Source: United States Navy
It is my first time here at the Center for Maritime Strategy. It’s also my first time speaking at a Future Fleet Symposium. I think you’ve had three of them so far, and it really is a great opportunity for me to be here.
It’s been great to see the Center for Maritime Strategy really taking up the charge to tell the story of our Navy, of our amazing sailors, our amazing civilians, and share that story with Congress, with industry, with all of our allies and partners, really, every stakeholder that we have all around the world.
So, as Admiral Foggo and the team were talking about a little bit earlier, I released my navigation plan for America’s warfighting Navy back in September and it was designed to provide my overarching strategic guidance to the Navy to make our nation’s fleet more ready for potential conflict with the People’s Republic of China by 2027 while also enhancing our Navy’s long-term warfighting advantage.
It talks a lot about what we’re going to do to get after the topics that are critical to our nation’s security, topics like some of those you’re going to be discussing today: strengthening our maritime industrial base, harnessing innovation in disruptive technology, and how we’re doing that alongside allies and partners through opportunities like AUKUS.
So over the next 10 or so minutes I want to talk to you a little bit about that navigation plan and how the industrial base is really critical to achieving the goals that are set forth in that plan and what we can do together to deliver the Navy our nation needs to fight and win if we’re called to do so.
So let me just add a little bit of my own perspective after having been CNO, as Admiral Foggo pointed out, for just a little bit over a year. With an average of a hundred and ten ships and 70,000 sailors and Marines deployed on any given day, our Navy-Marine Corps team is operating forward. They’re defending our homeland and they’re keeping open the sea lines of communication that fuel our economy.
And as you’ve all seen, our Navy-Marine Corps team has been in high demand this past year. In the Middle East our naval forces have operated inside the weapons engagement zone working alongside our allies and partners knocking down hundreds of Iranian- and Houthi-launched ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, really, at a rate that we haven’t seen since World War II. We’ve been doing that in self-defense. We’ve been doing that in defense of civilian mariners and the rules-based international order and Israel.
And this is just one region of the world where the Navy-Marine Corps team is operating forward to deter aggression, to be ready to respond in a crisis, and to win decisively in war if we’re called to do that.
And when you take a step and you look – take a step back and look at our global footprint, our fleets are operating seamlessly in every theater. They’re operating alongside the joint force, our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, in the Atlantic, in the Baltic, the High North, which I know you love to see, every day. They’re operating in the Mediterranean. And, again, we’re working hard to be able to deter our adversaries and, again, protect our nation’s security and our prosperity.
Last year Secretary Austin made the comment and observation that the United States is the most powerful country on Earth. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, and I think when you look at the Navy’s actions over the past year that demonstrates our enduring flexibility and our agility, and our actions are a strong reminder that naval power is and will continue to be an essential element of our national security.
I really could not be more proud of our Navy team, of our active reserve sailors, of our Navy civilians, of our families. There is no other navy in the world that can operate at this scale. No other navy can train, deploy, and sustain such a lethal, globally-deployed combat credible force at the pace, the scale, and the tempo that we do.
And while everything that we’ve achieved not just in the past year but in the years before it have filled me with a lot of confidence, I know that we cannot take our foot off the gas because our nation is at an inflection point in history, and when I first became CNO I knew that in order to get where we wanted to go we would first need to understand where we were – that we needed to learn more about our true position.
So, like every good navigator and surface warfare officer, I took a fix. I visited every fleet; engaged with industry; worked with Congress, OSD, the Joint Chiefs, all of our combatant commanders; met with sailors, met with civilians, met with families, chiefs of defense, and heads of navy all around the globe. And what I found is that we are facing a changing security environment, a changing character of war, and real challenges in our ship, submarine, and aircraft construction and maintenance, munitions production, recruiting, and infrastructure maintenance, all while acknowledging the industrial and budgetary challenges that complicate our efforts to address them.
To get after these challenges, I would love to have the resources and the industrial base capacity to be able to grow and modernize our force overnight to get more ready players on the field, and I acknowledge the need for a larger and more lethal force.
But our budget falls short of the 3 (percent) to 5 percent increase above inflation that we need to support our Navy’s growth. We’ve started 14 of the last 15 years with a continuing resolution and that really stifles our momentum and complicates our ability to provide clear headlights to industry.
So those are the constraints. Those are what I like to say is the known knowns that my fix has really made clear. And as the CNO who will only be at the helm into 2027, the chair – the year that Chairman Xi told his forces to be ready to invade Taiwan, I cannot stand still as we work to secure the long-term investments for the force and wait for them to manifest.
As the one charged with building, growing, and delivering the Navy our nation needs, I am compelled to do more and do more faster to ensure that our Navy is more ready for conflict than the PRC.
So my navigation plan essentially parks these known challenges in a box. It sets our course to make strategic gains in the fastest possible time with the resources that I can influence. It builds on “America’s Warfighting Navy” that I released back in January that lays out my priorities of warfighting, warfighters, and the foundation that supports them and it continues where my predecessor’s navigation plan left off.
It lays out my plan to raise our fleet’s baseline level of readiness and put more ready players on the field. Those are platforms that are ready with requisite capabilities, weapons, and sustainment, and it’s people that are ready with the right mindset, the skills, the tools, and the training.
And we will do that first by implementing what I call Project 33. These are seven key areas that we need to accelerate by 2027, areas like achieving 80 percent combat surge readiness, operationally integrating our robotic and autonomous systems, and restoring our critical infrastructure.
Project 33 is where I will invest my time and my resources and put my thumb on the scale to urgently move the needle with readiness for potential conflict with the PRC by 2027 as our North Star. And Project 33, in case you’re wondering where that comes from, it is a reference to my place as the 33rd Chief of Naval Operations in the continuum of past and future Navy leaders.
The second way we’re going to do that is by expanding the Navy’s contribution to the joint warfighting ecosystem. This is really all about investing in the key capabilities and enablers that will guarantee our enduring warfighting advantage. It’s what we call the Navigation Plan Implementation Framework 5+4.
It’s these capabilities like long-range fires, which is how we shoot, Counter-C5ISRT – how we maneuver – and contested logistics – how we sustain – that are critical to creating the layered effects that our Navy will contribute across all domains to those of the joint force and those of our allies and partners because, in the end, it is the aggregate effects that we deliver that matter.
So there’s no doubt that achieving the goals set forth in my navigation plan requires a robust, resilient, and dynamic industrial base. In order to raise that baseline level of readiness and deliver the enduring warfighting advantage we need for the future we need to grow and strengthen our nation’s defense industrial base.
Together we must think, act, and operate differently now to best prepare ourselves for a possible conflict in 2027, which isn’t a cliff – it is a waypoint. The conflict could be in 2027, 2032, 2045. Together we need to think about what each of us, what our people and our organizations, would be doing differently if we were at war, and then what are the concrete steps that we can take now to be more ready.
We have a historical example to look back to. The actions taken by industry and enabled by Congress before World War II illustrate the importance of being forward thinking about increasing our warfighting advantage and those actions – expanding infrastructure, increasing manpower, ramping up production taken by industry – enabled us to win World War II.
If you think about it, by 1944 industry delivered a B-24 every 63 minutes. But they were only able to do that because they thought long term 10 to 15 years before in the 1930s. The PRC and Russia are on a wartime footing today. To preserve our advantage, we should be too. We need industry to build capability and capacity now so we can surge effectively before and during any war because if deterrence fails there won’t be time to catch up.
This is an all-hands-on-deck effort where everybody has a role to play, whether it’s industry, Congress, academia, our joint teammates, our allies and partners, and, of course, all of us in America’s warfighting Navy.
As we get after building the Navy the nation needs today and in the future I would like to thank you for your partnership, for your innovation, for your passion, for your commitment, for your expertise, and your focus in these efforts.
Our success requires unity of effort and I am confident that together we can meet the demands of this strategic moment. We must move forward with purpose and urgency.
And, you know, I have a countdown clock in my office, and as I checked it when we left today there are 758 days until January 1st, 2027. There’s no time to waste. How will you think, act, and operate differently in those 758 days?
Thank you very much, and I look forward to our discussion and your questions today.