Thoughts for the Secretary of the Navy.

First, a tip of the hat to Secretary Phelan; by all accounts he was trying hard, but couldn’t gain traction (more on that in a moment). 

As for Secretary Cao, the best of luck. There are all sorts of folks making all sorts of predictions about the next Secretary, and what the right criteria are. I have bumped into some folks who knew Secretary Cao when he was Capt. Cao, and they say he is a good egg; I hope he gets the nod and fleets up.

That said, I would offer this:

The number one recommendation for a service secretary, for any of the departments, or any ambassadorship for that matter, at any time, no matter the President, is that he or she have the ear of the President. There are all sorts of folks who have the knowledge or technical expertise. The difference is monumental: to be able to reach out to the President or not can mean everything. Several times I saw instances where the Ambassador in country X talked regularly with the President while the Ambassador in the next county over got to talk with an Assistant Secretary of State; the difference was often painful to watch.

So, the first thing is access to the President.

The second thing is knowledge of the Navy. This doesn't need to be encyclopedic, but the Secretary needs to remember the main Navy missions (and they all overlap): strategic presence - access - lines of communication. It’s not about technology and it’s not about war-fighting. Obviously, war at sea and power projection are the coin of the realm. But that is for a whole host of other folks to really dig into. The Secretary needs to understand the main mission and have some vision as to what that mission will look like in 5 to 10 years, because that is his real window.

Third: a good plan now is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. As Annie noted: Tomorrow is always a day away. The Secretary needs to understand, the giant staffs - like NavSea and NavAir - are not your friends. I would hazard a guess that one of the things that happened to Secretary Phelan was that the OPNAV Staff wrapped their tentacles around him and choked him, overpowering him with charts and graphs and dog and pony shows as to why “This” can’t be done, “That” timeline can’t be changed, “Those” ideas really aren’t actionable, that the real way ahead is what “We, the Staff” have planned out “here” and “here” and “here,” we know what tomorrow looks like and it can’t be changed, and you would do best to pay attention only to us, all the rest of these people, especially the folks on the President’s staff, really don’t know what they are talking about.

A case in point is the issue of building the fleet the President wants, to include the Defiant class battleship. (And it is a battleship; insisting that battleships must carry big guns is pedantry. A very large surface combatant intended to function as the flagship of a large task force and possessing long range and deep strike weapon systems in an armored hull, built to fight and win at sea and project power over the shore: that’s a battleship.

And, I’ve heard multiple times now that it will take 6 years just to work out the design. Why?

We know what weapons are going into the hull, what power requirements will be needed, there are all sorts of rules of thumb for power and space and manning and damage control. We also have designs for surface ships in the 30,000 ton range designed as missile platforms that could be used as a starting point for design. And more to the point, we have artificial intelligence software now that has demonstrated in the past year the ability to compress tens of thousands of man-hours of technical work into just a few weeks of work. The Navy could, with the right attitude, turn itself into the cutting edge of ship design and development.

Some lessons from history are instructive:

In the weeks after the invasion of Poland (Fall of 1939) Henry Kaiser put together a team of folks from the US Navy, the Royal Navy, 11 major shipyards, steel manufacturers and a few others, and over the course of a few weeks redesigned the Ocean class merchant ship into what became the Liberty ships - standardizing it and changing it from rivet construction to welding (Rosie was a welder, not a riveter). Over the next 5 years they then constructed 2,710 Liberty ships, each of which required some 400,000 man-hours (women hours) of labor. That works out to some 1.1 billion man-hour of labor - not including the time that went into expanding shipyards and training literally hundreds of thousands of new welders. And that is only a slice of all the ships we built in 5 years. 

In those six years we also built 32 Essex class carriers, more than 100 escort and light carriers, 10 battleships, 2 battlecruisers, 34 cruisers, 291 destroyers, more than 150 submarines, more than 700 small escorts, several thousand smaller combatants and auxiliaries, more than 1,000 large auxiliaries and more than that in various amphibious support craft. And 324,750 aircraft.

And if you want to see what a little effort can produce in the world of high tech, the initial design work for the A-12 / SR-71 began in spring of 1958, and the first aircraft flew in April 1962. 

The first nuclear powered submarine, USS Nautilus was authorized in 1951, launched in January 1954, and deployed in May of 1955.

Are the problems of integration so severe today that even with 80 more years of experience, and all the lessons learned in those 80 years, and the help of hardware and software that would marvel the engineers of the 1940s, we can’t design a ship in less that half a decade? That is nonsense. 

And we are talking about billions and billions of hours of labor to make those ships and aircraft… Newly trained folks, new machines, more jobs AND more automation. Why can’t we add 200 or 300 million (or more) man-hours per year to the ship construction and ship maintenance problem? Say, 1 billion more hours of labor every three years… 

What could we do with 1 billion hours of labor:

4 Ford class carriers (50 million man-hours each)

Plus

100 Burke DDGs (about 4 million man-hours each)

Plus 

50 Virginia class SSN (about 8 million man-hours each)

But no, the endless caterwauling is the truth. 

And it’s impossible to fly

And it’s impossible to go faster than sound

And Man will never go to the Moon

The real truth is that these huge staffs believe in zero sum games. If we ask for more maintenance, then there must be less new construction and vice versa. This needs to stop. And the staffs need to be cut down, they are roadblocks to progress.

Prior to the Civil War the US was the leading ship construction nation in the world. For two periods since then (World War I and World War II) the US regained that title. We can regain that title once again. That is the opportunity Secretary Cao has. I hope he seizes the chance. 

And as for the money, how about reducing the level of graft and corruption across the entire US Government? The Grace commission pointed out 40 years ago what Musk pointed out last year: 15 - 20% of the USG is pure waste. That works out to $1 - 1.5 TRILLION per year… Let’s fix that and use some of that money…