Reforming the Navy Secretariat: Bureaucratic Requirements to Achieve a Vision of American Seapower

Introduction
This post is a summary of ideas that have been germinating in my mind for a while. I have been arguing for a powerful vision of American Seapower for some time now, and closer Navy/Marine Corps integration has consistently been at the heart of it. I have come to conclude that the benefits of what I argue are worth pursuing, but that achieving them is unlikely as long as the two Services are not invested in a common understanding of American Seapower and led by an organization dedicated to discerning one.

In the Navy, I enjoyed four tours in Washington. Admittedly, none of them were on the Navy Secretariat, and so I do not write from a position of great authority on its inner workings. My observations are those of an interested observer who has worked around and in the vicinity of this staff. I welcome factual refutations of my opinions and observations.

Theory of the Case:
• America plays a critical and leading role in the world
• It is in America’s interest to continue to execute this role.
• America has interests that are thousands of miles from its own territory.
• America’s sovereign territory is relatively safe from military threat.
• The rise of China and a resurgent and belligerent Russia present a new era of Great Power competition.
• America is likely to encounter China and Russia as an adversary in areas contiguous to the world’s oceans, as this is where the majority of the world’s population lives.
• The Department of the Navy has within it two Armed Services that specialize in operating from the sea.
• These Armed Services provide the world’s most powerful naval force, the world’s most feared middleweight land force, and the world’s most mobile and lethal air force.
• These forces—if properly resourced—are capable of servicing the majority of U.S. presence, conventional deterrence, assurance, and crisis response requirements.
• In order to do so, these expeditionary capabilities must be more closely integrated into a cohesive and integral maritime fighting force, a new vision of American Seapower.
• In order to achieve a new vision of American Seapower, a closer alignment of all aspects of organizing, training, and equipping the Navy and Marine Corps must be considered. Planning, programming, and budgeting must also be included. Redundancy, overlap, and conflict must be minimized.
• The Department of the Navy Secretariat, under the Secretary of the Navy, is the organization that must bring about this closer integration and alignment.
• Process and administrative changes in the Secretariat and throughout the two Services will be required.

Explanation
America’s role in the world and its favorable geography create the conditions under which Seapower can and should play a central and distinct role in its security and prosperity. By combining the capabilities of the world’s most powerful Navy, the world’s most feared middleweight land force, and the world’s most mobile and lethal air force, the Department of the Navy plays a leading role in all of the missions of the Department of Defense:
• Counter terrorism and irregular warfare
• Deter and defeat aggression
• Project power despite anti-access/area denial challenges
• Counter weapons of mass destruction
• Operate effectively in cyberspace and space
• Maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent
• Defend the homeland and provide support to civil authorities
• Provide a stabilizing presence
• Conduct stability and counterinsurgency operations
• Conduct humanitarian, disaster relief, and other operations.

This is not to say that the Department of the Navy performs ALL of all of these missions. Its role varies from mission to mission. What should not be disputed however, is the fact that the primary operational formations derived of the forces organized, trained, and equipped within the Department perform these missions as a matter of routine on a global basis. The very nature of American Seapower offers the nation the ability to field and operate forces that can protect and sustain American interests thousands of miles from its own shores, at the point of impact where the overwhelming majority of the world population lives. And while the Seapower resident in the Department of the Navy cannot perform all of the missions above in their totality all of the time, it can perform them to a greater degree than any other aspect of American military power most of the time in most places most efficiently.

In not recognizing the unique and foundational contributions of American Seapower to the nation’s defense, duplication, and waste are promoted as precious resources are inefficiently allocated, rendering the nation somewhat less capable of defending its interests for a given investment.
It is therefore essential that the an integral and coherent vision of American Seapower be formulated and espoused, one that presents the case that the nation can and should lean more heavily on the Department of the Navy for its peacetime crisis response and security requirements, while the forces of the other military departments prioritize preparation for the conduct and winning of largescale conflict.

Such a vision is however, insufficient, as the current organization of the Department of the Navy and its subordinate Armed Services (the Navy and the Marine Corps) does not adequately support the integration of capabilities that would be required in order to bring it about. Simply put, a coherent vision of American Seapower at the operational level demands a greater degree of integration at the very top, in efforts including planning, programming, budgeting, organizing, training, and equipping. By thinking more expansively about the utility of American Seapower and how it can best serve the needs of the Republic, pressures arise on the Navy and Marine Corps to work more closely together bureaucratically and organizationally in order to bring about the operational results desired.
Such integration is unlikely to occur from the bottom up. Service cultures and comfortable roles and missions create a situation in which the promise of American Seapower is unlikely to be achieved if the Navy and Marine Corps are left to themselves to bring it about. A forcing function is required.

Therefore, a reorganization of the Department of the Navy, undertaken with support of the President, the Secretary of Defense, and appropriate Congressional Committees is necessary to take positive steps designed to ensure that within the Department of the Navy, a greater level of Service integration is achieved, while also working to obtain the resources necessary to field the capabilities and capacities necessary to more effectively service the nation’s peacetime security and presence needs. It is not enough to say that we need a larger Navy and or Marine Corps. We must ensure that the American people understand what will be done with such an increase, why it is in the nation’s interest to do so, and how doing so will make a given level of defense spending go further.

Pathologies

Strategic Thinking
There is no organization within the Department of the Navy dedicated to thinking about integrated American Seapower.
Both the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps maintain three star directorates with “strategy” within their mandate, in addition to small, highly influential strategic cells that report directly to the Service Chief. In none of these organizations is there a meaningful representation of officers from the other Service.
The Department of the Navy Secretariat has no such organization.
The lack of such an organization has not however, resulted in no strategic thinking in the Department. Quite the contrary, two maritime strategies have been produced in the past ten years (2007, 2015). These were however, ad hoc efforts that do not appear to have influenced fleet operations or force structure, and in at least the 2007 instance, was undertaken around and without the inclusion of the Service Secretary.

Strategic Communications
Under the Secretary of the Navy, there is a Chief of Information (CHINFO) and a Chief of Legislative Affairs (OLA). These officers report directly to the Secretary, with dotted line reporting responsibility to the Chief of Naval Operations. Neither organization is responsible for Marine Corps affairs, as the Commandant of the Marine Corps has his own legislative assistant and his own public affairs assistant.
In essence, the organizations charged with Department of the Navy strategic communications represent only one Service (the Navy), and to the extent that the other Service—the Marine Corps—requires these functions, they are creatures of the office of the Commandant, not the Secretary of the Navy.
In essence, any strategic communications efforts are derived of three disjointed and unaligned efforts—Department of the Navy, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Marine Corps.
Additionally, no one person in the Department of the Navy is charged with the creation and implementation of a coherent strategic communications plan including legislative affairs, public affairs, and international messaging. Put another way, even if there were a coherent strategic narrative promoting the benefits of American Seapower, there is no process, organization, task force, or group responsible for carrying it out.

Planning and Programming
The Navy and Marine Corps do not receive adequate planning and programming guidance from the Secretary of the Navy at the beginning of the annual budget cycle, guidance designed to achieve a coherent vision of American Seapower. Secretary priority items are included in current guidance, but the degree to which the Services respond to a coherent and integrated vision of Seapower is minimal at best. There is little evidence that the Services are instructed what to devalue or cut.
The Navy and Marine Corps maintain separate planning and programming functions designed to create inputs (known as a “program objective memorandum” or POM) to the annual defense budget. There is little or no coordination between the Services during the development of Service POM’s, and there is limited interaction between the Services and the Navy Secretariat.
The Navy Secretariat does not have an organization staffed to issue such guidance, monitor its implementation, and remedy shortfalls. To the extent that any changes are made to the Service POM’s, they come late in the process and are generally made within individual Service POMs.

Acquisition
Meaningful reform to the acquisition system is essential to achieving alignment within the Department of the Navy, as a vision of American Seapower would create derived requirements and the opportunity for capability trades between and among USN and USMC acquisition efforts.
This currently happens to some degree within the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition. This work is however, undermined by the disjointed strategic communications efforts described above.
Captain Mark Vandroff, USN and I laid out a proposal for reforming Department of the Navy acquisition elsewhere, and rather than repeat it here, readers are urged to review it. Though not mentioned in that article, the need for an integrated strategic communications/legislative relations effort is essential to achieving some of the benefits of the recommended reforms.

Recommendations
• Revive the Office of Program Appraisal (OPA) on the Navy Secretariat at the two-star level. A staff made up of USN/USMC and civilian experts in strategic thinking and budgeting. Headed by a two-star with a one-star deputy who fleets up. Alternates between Navy and USMC. Billets would come from USN (N3/N5, N8) and USMC (P,P,&O/P&R). This organization would have the dual mission of aligning the American Seapower strategic narrative and providing oversight of Service POM development in order to achieve it.
• Empower the Under Secretary of the Navy to manage Navy Department Strategic Communications.  VCNO, ACMC, CHINFO, OLA, N3/N5, and PP@O would all serve on a DON strategic communications Board of Directors. Public, legislative, and international messaging would be aligned within this BOD.
o Both CHINFO and OLA would become truly Departmental organizations. The Commandant would lose the Assistant for Legislative Matters and the Assistant for Public Affairs. The two-star heads of these organizations would have a one-star deputy who fleets up. The heads of these organizations would be filled by officers from the two services, with no more than 90 days at a time in which officers from one of the Services are in both positions.
• Empower the Secretary of the Navy as the single responsible party for Departmental capability definition and its acquisition, subject to overrule only by the President or the Secretary of Defense (within the Executive Department). This is described more fully in the previously linked to USNI News piece.

Conclusion

The promise of powerful, integrated American Seapower tending to the nation’s peacetime presence and crisis response missions while it creates the conditions for garrison forces to fall in on for warfighting, will not occur organically. There are powerful interests aligned against it, and as this article may reveal, potentially good arguments against it.

I look forward to those arguments being made, and to those arguments in agreement with the central proposition of this proposal but with doubts about the offered solutions.

In the end, this nation’s geography, interests, and role in the world demand more of its naval services.  Seapower advocates must not shy away from the benefits conferred to this nation by a powerful naval force, even if it means relative comparisons with other elements of military power.

Reforming Acquisition to Enable American Seapower

Captain Mark Vandroff and I have a piece over at USNI News on how to reform the acquisition system to enable a greater vision of American Seapower.

Have a look here.

Surface Navy Association 2016 Wrap Up Panel

Ron O'Rourke, Chris Cavas, and Eric Labs consented to appear with me on a panel at the Surface Navy Association 2016 Symposium--with VADM Lee Gunn ably moderating.

Thoughts on the Farsi Island Incident January 12

By now most of you have heard the news of the initial incident and have read several details of the incident that have been reported in the press. The bottom line, there are still a lot of unknowns even as the incident was resolved diplomatically within 24 hours. Below are a few thoughts.

1) Even 48 hours after the initial incident it doesn't even appear CENTCOM or the Pentagon has a full accounting of the details of exactly what happened. People who have been telling the narrative since the incident first occurred are sure to be proven wrong, since they have almost certainly been guessing as to causes and motives. In the end, it is starting to look to be exactly what it looks like... a bunch of young sailors lost because of reliance on technology and/or machinery that failed. There is also, potentially, a training issue here related to navigation and leadership.

2) Those who are claiming the US Navy should have shot their way out of the standoff - when it appears the US Navy sailors actually involved appeared to have convinced themselves their ships were inside Iranian waters - make very interesting and yet terrible arguments for shooting at Iranians. Farsi Island may be a disputed Island in the Persian Gulf, but there is an IRGC naval base on that island and presence in the first rule of ownership. If the Iranian Navy, or Russian Navy, or any Navy drifted armed boats into US waters off Kings Bay, I suspect the US Coast Guard and/or US Navy would be very quick to point guns and be active in detaining the drifters.

3) I am unable to see any strategic advantage the US would have gained by fighting Iran inside the 3 mile zone of Iranian territory, and I am unable to see any strategic consequence to the US by not fighting Iran inside the 3 mile zone of Iranian territory. However, had the US Navy tried to shoot their way out of that situation, the strategic consequences would have been significant, and not just how it relates to Iran. Such a violent action would have given China a valid example to act the same way in disputed places in the South China Sea. If the US Navy is going to lead the global commons based on our interpretation of the rules at sea, the LT who apologized (and everyone on the political right is flogging) just forwarded America strategically. I note it is primarily the parochial arguments from people whose expertise lies in other military services like the Army who have completely ignored the details like global rule sets at sea who have been the loudest to shout at the Navy in this incident. With all due respect, this is an incredibly parochial and shortsided overreaction of the incident, because the National Review can and should do better than finding an Army guy - Bing West (whom I know and respect but wtf...) when it comes to a complex naval incident. This isn't the Pueblo, nor is it the Korean War. There will be no museum in Iran, and both the boats and the crews were returned.

4) This is one of those difficult issues that, in my mind, separates serious people who care about serious strategic issues the US faces in the 21st century and demagogues who see conspiracy and opportunity in every political crisis. If you are a partisan who sees a conspiracy, go away. For the rest of us, there are serious naval issues here that need serious answers. These are a few of the initial questions that should be considered.

- Is the maintenance of the riverine command boats contracted to the point the onboard crew was unable to repair the problem? The crew of only 5 sailors per boat suggests to me that something might be off with the manpower and maintenance procedures surrounding these very capable chess pieces of naval equipment. The RCB is made to fight in the Persian Gulf, but a broken RCB isn't going to win.

 - This is a teaching moment if there ever was one, and as an incident this appears to represent a textbook case study on the reasons why the Navy needs more, not fewer, Commands for junior officers. It may be the opinion of some hard core political demagogues who have over a decade of tactical success combined with over a decade of strategic failure that this incident is somehow a defeat for America, but each new fact that emerges from this incident suggests to me this may be a case of procedural failure far beyond the scope of a LT... but when shit happened, strategic acumen by the officer in charge (LT) is potentially emerging as a feature in handling a bad situation and not making it worse. The facts are still unknown, and we may not know for sure for awhile, but regardless of what the facts are in the end I see this as a very teachable moment that favors the argument for early Command as often as possible for junior officers.

- I have no problem with high profile diplomatic incidents like this between the US Navy and Iran, as long as for each incident the actions of the US Navy is aligned with the strategic aims of the United States. If the US Navy had attacked the IRGC inside the territorial waters of Farsi Island to defend their boats, this would be a major strategic setback for the US. Had the incident occurred outside the territorial waters of Iran and the US Navy not fought back; that would also be a strategic setback for the US. Right now it appears the US Navy sailors on the scene did everything right.

- The only way to produce a genuine strategic failure from this incident is to unfairly punish those involved, in other words... if the Navy wants better commanders, handle early career mistakes the right way. Tell me how any of those 10 sailors are somehow worse off for this incident. If legitimate mistakes were made, deal with it appropriately, but pinning blame for things out of their control would be a failure of leadership, and in my mind an unforgivable sin.

- At the end of the day, this was a real diplomatic test of the US and Iran who under the recent agreement are partners in Iran's nuclear energy ambitions. The outcome is very positive for the United States. I don't trust the government of Iran, but I am yet to see anything from this incident that suggests to me Iran has has been inappropriate. If you're the American Idiot who doesn't think it was appropriate for the US Navy sailors to have their hands on their heads at any point in the engagement near the IRGC base on Farsi Island, try drifting your private armed boat into the US Navy area of Kings Bay or Norfolk or New London and pretend like there is a snowballs chance in hell you will get out of there without your hands on your head. You will have your hands on your head, or if you point a gun back at the US Navy or US Coast Guard, you will be shot dead by very serious people who protect that location and will be pointing guns at you. You don't even have to be an Iranian for that outcome to occur, nor will you need an Iranian flag on your boat, a US flag will result in the same action. Wake up people, don't let the silly season control your ability to think with objectivity.

I look forward to learning what really happened, because at the end of the day we have a well armed naval craft in the middle of the Persian Gulf with a serious mechanical problem that couldn't be quickly resolved apparently combined with some incredibly bad navigation from two crews who somehow found their way to the only piece of land between their departure location and destination that could create a diplomatic problem. When you swim past all the political bullshit, the serious naval specific issues on the table leave a lot of serious questions that deserve serious answers.

GAO Wrong on LCS Survivability

USS Fort Worth Arrives in Singapore, December 2014, Military.com

     The recent (18 December 2024) GAO Report entitled, “The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS): Knowledge of Survivability and Lethality Capabilities Needed Prior to Making Major Funding Decisions” demonstrates the Government Accountability Office’s flawed understanding of modular warship survivability and lethality concepts. The agency has a point in suggesting LCS survivability needs more testing, but has made nearly the same demand for most warship classes of the last several decades. It rarely, however, presses that call beyond the boundaries of modeling and simulation. The LCS program is far from perfect, and has yet to meet a number of important milestones. That said, the survivability of LCS as defined by the September 2012 Navy Instruction on the subject is equivalent to that of the retired Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates in their final configuration. LCS replaces the Perry's in their final status and not in the medium air defense and heavy convoy escort roles they were originally designed to fill. The LCS mission modules could also be tailored to support additional weapons and systems that reduce susceptibility and vulnerability. 

     GAO has secured much of its evidence for LCS’s lack of survivability from a Total Ship Survivability Trial (TSST) conducted on USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) in October 2014.[1] TSST focuses on the crew training necessary to conduct the damage control to restore the ship’s operational capability while it remains in a combat environment. LCS would obviously not fare well in such testing for two reasons. First, a substantial portion of the equipment that could be damaged in an attack and the additional personnel that operate that equipment are not physically present on the current sea frames. They are resident in the yet to be fully developed mission modules. Any present TSST of LCS would be partially incomplete. Second, LCS is not designed to restore battle damage and immediately return to the fight, as are higher capability warships. It was conceived to survive damage and withdraw as necessary.[2]

     GAO acknowledges the limits of the LCS Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and notes the Navy’s 2012 change in the foundation of survivability from ship “characteristics” to “capabilities.”[3] The agency persists, however, in aiming its report on the sea frame’s physical damage control aspects; its characteristics, rather than its capabilities to avoid or prevent attack, such as its installed active and passive defense systems.[4] It continues to reference a 2004 Navy measurement of survivability in describing LCS that is no longer used by the Navy. GAO notes the deletion of three design features of survivability from previous LCS designs due to weight/cost considerations. Given that the sea frame’s armament is unchanged, it seems that these missing elements were characteristics and not capabilities. Finally, GAO seems to suggest that the Navy deliberately changed the LCS CONOPS in order to, “To compensate for any gaps in the ship’s survivability and lethality capabilities.”[5]

     The Navy altered its survivability description for good reason. The principal threats faced by surface warships have significantly changed in the last two decades. The proliferation of capable cruise missiles, submarine torpedoes, and naval mines represents a significant threat to any ship less than 600 feet in length and 10,000 tons displacement. These limits encompass the entire U.S. Navy surface combatant force (excepting the Zumwalt class destroyer.) Damage to U.S. Navy surface ships in the last several decades has been limited to small cruise missiles such as the Exocets that damaged the USS Stark in 1987 and the relatively small influence and contact mines that crippled the USS Princeton in 1991 and nearly sank the USS Samuel B. Roberts in 1988. Current versions of these weapons are larger, faster and much more capable. The recent Russian cruise missile salvo (at least 26 missiles) fired against land targets in Syria from a flotilla of small warships suggests the level of threat faced by U.S. warships.[6] Surface combatants no longer carry armor and are fully dependent on their installed active and passive defense systems to avoid, decoy or shoot down such weapons. While damage control remains important, survivability must not be fully predicated on a ship’s physical characteristics. The Navy’s measurement of survivability properly changed in response to the change in the threat to surface ships from a new generation of larger and more capable cruise missiles, and improved torpedoes and mines.

     GAO’s assessment of the lethality of LCS suffers from the same problems associated with its survivability measurements. The agency agrees that LCS completed interim testing of its surface warfare (SUW) package in April 2014, but then said that testing was incomplete due to the lack of both sea frames being tested (a valid point), but also because not all SUW requirements could be met. That should not be a surprise considering the evaluated SUW package was an interim fitting and not the ship’s final operational capability module. Testing cited by GAO, and done by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) further states that the testing of the SUW package was, “insufficient to provide statistical confidence that LCS can consistently demonstrate this level of performance.”[7] How much testing of an interim package is required to attain statistical confidence and how much would this testing cost or limit the ship’s operational employment? DOT&E in fact requires the LCS program to re-test an entire mission package if even one component (however small) is changed. LCS is dependent on the ability to rapidly field new mission packages in response to different tactical and operational circumstances. The testing regime of the analysis community would seem to limit this important LCS capability.

     The threat environment facing the LCS has changed significantly since the program was announced in November 2001. The Navy has attempted to respond to this change by modifying the sea frame, mission modules and ship’s CONOPS to meet the changing threat environment. The analysis community, as represented by GAO and DOT&E seems trapped in the relatively stable Cold War and post-Cold War era where slow, predictable, incremental change was managed through an ever-expanding test and evaluation regime. LCS, with many of its most lethal capabilities in separate mission modules, and/or still under development will not likely meet the requirements of the 1960’s-era analysis community until its mission modules are fully developed. The ability of LCS to rapidly adjust its capabilities in response to new threats will remain limited with such stringent testing requirements accompanying each mission package change.

     GAO’s unhappiness with LCS should come as no surprise. A short review of the last 40 years of surface warship construction suggests that the agency has little love for any particular platform. It has severely criticized the Perry class frigate for survivability issues[8]; the Spruance class destroyer for a lack of lethality[9]; and the Ticonderoga class cruiser for lack of AEGIS testing and room for growth.[10]    

     GAO has a point in suggesting that capability-based survival of warships needs evaluation beyond modeling and simulation. Live fire tests on naval platforms were the normative method of predicting survivability from the 1920’s through the end of the Cold War.[11] The number of hits a vessel could sustain was an adequate predictor of its survival as an operational contributor in combat. The development of more powerful weapons, the evolution of very effective active and passive defense systems and the accelerated fragility of surface combatants in supporting them have changed these time-honored evaluation criteria. Those active and passive systems are now the equivalent of what armor was to combatants of the early 20^th century. While these systems have been tested through modeling and simulation, the only real way to examine their effectiveness is through expensive live fire exercises against a target ship with active systems including surface to air missiles, guns and electronic countermeasures. This last recommendation is a useful contribution from the GAO report, but the office must recommend such testing for all surface combatants and not just LCS.

          Evaluation of LCS using Cold War-era methodology is not an accurate measurement of the class’ survivability or lethality. GAO has a long history of criticizing surface combatant programs, and the office’s present dislike of LCS should be no surprise. GAO should recommend that all surface combatants be tested according to their capabilities and not just their characteristics. Finally, GAO should re-evaluate the survivability of LCS to take into account its modular design.  

---

[1]http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/674367.pdf, p. 3.

[2] http://awin.aviationweek.com/Portals/AWeek/Ares/work%20white%20paper.PDF, pp. 20-22.

[3] http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/674367.pdfp. 7.

[4] Ibid, p. 12.

[5] Ibid

[6]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34479873

[7]http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/674367.pdf, p. 14.

[8]http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/108301.pdf, pp. 12-14.

[9]http://www.gao.gov/assets/80/78744.pdf, p. 5

[10]http://archive.gao.gov/f0102/115229.pdf

[11] https://clashofarms.com/files/Staying_Power.pdf

Some New Year's Thoughts On Aircraft Carriers

The year past was an important one for the Navy and its power projection centerpiece, the large, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Dr. Jerry Hendrix and I got things off to a rollicking start in January with an old-school debate about carriers at the Naval Academy, my think-tank released a study that makes the case for the necessity of the carrier in the high end fight--a view 180 degrees out of the prevailing narrative of China's A2AD arsenal rendering the carrier obsolete, and Hendrix rounded out the year with a superb study of how the carrier's "retreat from range" had indeed fed the narrative just referenced.

Along the way, the Senate Armed Services Committee led by its Chairman Senator John McCain (R-AZ) performed a necessary and critical oversight role in relentlessly urging the Navy to reduce the cost of the carrier and improve its acquisition performance. Additionally, Senator McCain sent the Navy and other organizations off to evaluate alternative carrier designs, because he asserts, "we simply cannot afford to pay $12.9B for a single ship."  Those evaluations will hit the street in 2016, which is incidentally the year the nation's newest carrier USS GERALD R FORD (CVN 78) is due to be commissioned.

Having so publicly defended the aircraft carrier in 2015, I begin 2016 by asserting that I am not an aircraft carrier advocate, just as I am not a destroyer advocate, or a maritime patrol aircraft advocate (both of which I will defend with the same tenacity as I do the CVN). No, I am a Seapower advocate, and because I continue to cling to the increasingly outdated notion that our Navy and Marine Corps perform the equally strategically important functions of preventing AND conducting war, I will continue to defend the aircraft carrier's centrality in a balanced fleet capable of performing both of these functions.

So to get the year off on the right foot, a few thoughts to baseline what is likely to be another year of churn on this topic.

1. It's the Air Wing, Stupid.  While I disagree with Senator McCain's pronouncement that we "...cannot afford to pay $12.9B for a single ship" (see below), the plain, ugly truth is that if the FORD Class cost $9B, its utility in deterring the wars we must not fight (and the wars that we therefore cannot lose) would not be any more apparent. To put it another way, whether we spend $12.9B or $9B or $5B--the money will be ill-allocated unless the main battery of the carrier evolves to meet the threat. By that, I mean that the air wing must evolve (as it has consistently for seven decades) to provide long range stealthy strike, sea control, ISR, and organic refueling, if even the first dollar allocated in carrier construction is to be worthwhile. Jerry Hendrix report above, and the one we did at Hudson (also cited) make this point forcefully. Without this evolution (and a timely evolution at that), the carrier will indeed become what its critics have predicted for decades, an expensive anachronism. And as the Hudson study asserted, the carrier--with an upgraded air wing--is likely to provide essential and unique combat capability in high end scenarios under consideration. But only if the air wing evolves.
2. What Should a Carrier Cost? Many critics of the FORD Class take aim squarely at its cost, most recently estimated by the Navy at $12.9B.  My response to them is, what should it cost? What should a floating, nuclear-powered air base, that moves...at 40 plus knots....for fifty years...cost?  Against what are you comparing it? No other bit of military kit is as complex or as useful as the aircraft carrier, and very few examples of military hardware last as long. Are we so unduly influenced by its acquisition cost that we lose the ability to adequately assess the long term return on investment? Also, since we buy a carrier once every five years, about a third of one percent of every dollar spent on defense in those five years are spent on CVN's. Are the above benefits not worth a third of a percent?  We are entering a new era of great power contention, and the post-Cold War model of defense spending is insufficient. We need to begin building up to meet the challenges of this new competition, and while we must continue to do everything we can to drive excess cost out of acquisition programs, perspective and understanding of what is required to meet this challenge is necessary. Viewing an asset with the capability and flexibility of the CVN--even at its current cost--as "unaffordable" is simply inconsistent with the demands of the future.
3. You Can't Go Backward, You Won't Do Better, and Steel and Space are Cheap.  Chairman McCain's direction to the Navy to go back to the drawing board and to study alternative carrier designs is a useful and necessary task, one that forces what is a characteristically hidebound organization to examine its presumptions and prove its assertions. Similar inquiries have been forced upon the Navy in the past, as the Hudson study above recounts. Each time, however, two consistent themes arise in the analysis. Bigger is better, and nuclear power is preferable to fossil fuels. Size and propulsion are directly related to the performance of the ship/air wing system, as measured by a diverse series of metrics including sortie generation, aircraft size accommodation, range, and mission diversity. Because steel and space are relatively cheap, the additional size gained in a larger carrier creates disproportionately large increases in performance. Put another way, if the Navy is presented with a design for an aircraft carrier that costs 2/3 of what the FORD costs AND can deliver 2/3 of its performance (or better)--it should consider buying it. You can substitute any ratio into the previous sentence, and my view would be the same. The trouble is, such a carrier does not appear to exist. If this nation simply wants to spend less on its aircraft carriers because it believes them to be too expensive, than our leaders need to step forward and declare that they are content with buying proportionally less capability. Some have suggested simply dropping back, retooling, and building NIMITZ class carriers again beginning in the 2020's. Such a path should be considered among the various options. My gut tells me that the cost of such a move, coupled with a decrease in ship/air wing performance that would occur, would be nonsensical in comparison to continuing to build FORD Class carriers and benefiting from the historic constant dollar decline in cost of ships in serial production. 
4. Competition For Hulls Would Be Nice, But It Is Not Going To Happen With Our Current Industrial Base. Building large, complex surface ships is done at frightfully few places in the United States. Building large complex surface ships from which fixed wing aircraft can be launched and recovered is done at two places in the United States. Building large, complex nuclear-powered surface ships from which fixed wing aircraft can be launched and recovered is done at one place in the United States. While I take a backseat to no one in my support for the benefits of competition in free markets, I am unconvinced that any attempt to inject hull-based competition into the carrier program will have any impact on cost--except to increase it. If the United States decided that it needed additional shipbuilding capacity in order to produce a competed, conventionally powered aircraft carrier, it would almost certainly have to invest billions of dollars into capital improvements at an existing yard that isn't owned by the one company that owns both yards currently capable of doing so (Huntington Ingalls Industries at its Newport News, VA and Pascagoula, MS yards). The cost of capitalizing a second nuclear powered aircraft carrier building yard would be enormous. Putting aside the prohibitive costs of competing hulls, were we to push for a conventionally powered variant simply to reduce total costs, we run into the problems cited above in #3. To the extent that competition CAN be pushed back into the CVN program, it is going to largely reside in the Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) that the shipbuilder is provided with, and competition for these items demands that the horrible mistakes in early CVN 78 program management and oversight not be repeated. The 2002 decision to inject over a dozen unproven technology upgrades into the first hull (CVN 78) rather than across the first three, dealt this program early blows from which it is only now recovering.  Congress must continue to hammer the Navy on the twin/related problems of immature designs and concurrency, while ensuring that as much competition is injected into the furnishing of mature capability. 
5. The Burden is On the Critics to Show The Extensibility of Their Views. If someone were to come forward with a fleet architecture that either diminished or eliminated the importance of the CVN while maintaining the balance of conventional deterrence and warfighting that exists in the current fleet, I would walk away from the CVN in a heartbeat. But like the proportionally capable/cheaper aircraft carrier, such a fleet architecture does not currently exist. The perturbations from the current fleet architecture either diminish warfighting in order to plus up deterrence, or (as we see from the letter above from SECDEF to SECNAV) they diminish deterrence in order to plus up wafighting. I do not believe that the current fleet architecture is the ONLY one that could accomplish the required balance between conventional warfighting and deterrence. But in my view, any competing approach MUST demonstrate in some reasonable manner that it maintains such a balance, or that such a balance is no longer required or desired. 

Ok, release the hounds. There are a few things to chew on as we all consider how to best contribute to the robust debate underway in our area of collective interest. Happy New Year.

Bryan McGrath