Interview: US Navy Secretary Mabus

[nitpicker]

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/interview-us-navy-secretary-mabus-on-alternative-fuels-lcs-and-what-actually-happened-to-furlough-funds

Interview: US Navy Secretary Mabus on Alternative Fuels, LCS, and What Actually Happened to Furlough Funds

By: Christopher P. Cavas, December 18, 2016
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What was your toughest time in office?

In 2013, one of the fights that I lost, the Navy didn’t need to furlough anybody. We didn’t. I fought to not furlough. We had seen it coming – we sort of cut back on expenditures and we were in these meetings where the then-deputy secretary of defense, Ash Carter, would say we’re in this together. The Army needs the money, the Air Force needs the money. And they just took enough money away from Navy until we had to furlough to meet these other things.
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I’ll say one more thing. I talk about getting 308 ships by 2021. We’re going to get there. I said in an all-hands call in response to a question that I guarantee you in 2021, whoever the secretary of the Navy is, they’ll stand up there and say look what I did, I got to 308 ships, even though they will have had nothing to do with it. I’ve got 272 ships in the fleet today. That’s a result of decisions that were made in 2002 and 2004 and 2006.
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I did and I continue to believe in the LCS. I think it gives us capabilities that no other ship does. I think the program had lots of problems at the beginning – cost, schedule, capabilities – and I think we’ve fixed virtually everything. First with the design and then with taking a look at how we use it and with the training and with how we crew it.
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Then we came up with the frigate design – up-armored, more lethal, more survivable. If you added all the things that people say you need, it was a destroyer. It was over a billion dollars a ship and it doesn’t come into the fleet for another eight or 10 years. And say you substitute destroyers for LCS, just build 52 more destroyers or however many it takes to get to 52. Where’s the money coming from? LCSs are coming in under $500 million, even the frigate design. Destroyers are more than three times that. But I think after all the sound and fury that LCS will survive and be fine.

What do you hope are your most lasting accomplishments?

The first thing is I turned the fleet around. It was declining. It had been declining for years, just in terms of numbers. [The fleet we’re building] is a balanced fleet. We’re buying two submarines a year. We’re buying 10 submarines over five years. We’re buying 10 destroyers over the same five years. We’ve got three aircraft carriers under various stages of construction today. We’ve got two big-deck amphibious ships now under construction. We’ve moving to the LXR [amphibious ship replacement] to replace the LSD [landing ship dock]. You’ve heard this speech over and over again, but 41 ships put under contract from ’01 to ’08, 86 ships put under contract from ’09 to ’16. If we had put 41 ships under contract, like had been done before, our fleet gets down into the 220 or lower. If the next person and the next person and the next person doesn’t keep building them, at some point we fall off a cliff.

I haven’t done it at the expense of air. We’ve bought 35 percent more aircraft during that time. We’re recapitalizing virtually every air program that we’ve got. Our air assets are hurting because we’ve just flown so much more than we thought we would when we bought these things. We’ve protected research and development. We’ve protected science and technology money so that weapons systems continue to have a technological edge.

I think the personnel initiatives, just in terms of making careers more flexible, in terms of having a more diverse force, having a stronger force, are part of Navy culture now. In terms of how we approach our people, how we deal with sailors and Marines, allowing COs to promote 5 percent of their sailors meritoriously. When I came in, we were doing perform-to-serve and enlisted retention boards, which were terrible. We were losing really good sailors just because their reenlistment date came up. We’ve stabilized that.

The maternity leave, child care opening earlier and keeping it open later, that’s not just for women. That’s for families. Co-location, trying to co-locate couples if you can. The notion that if you commit a bad act but you may have post-traumatic stress disorder, you may have traumatic brain injury – we may still separate you, but we won’t give you bad paper so that you can get some help for that. We’ve changed that. I think we are a far stronger service today because of that. I think we are attracting and keeping a very high caliber of sailor and Marine.

I think in terms of power, the energy stuff that we’re doing. At the very beginning, there was not much Navy or Marine Corps support. Now there's a tremendous amount of support for changing the way we make it, changing the way we use it. You’ve heard my speech – we were losing a Marine killed or wounded for every 50 convoys of fuel we brought in to Afghanistan. You landed at Camp Leatherneck or Bagram or anywhere and you drove by generator after generator after generator. Having the Marines just have rollable solar panels to put in their pack freed them up from being resupplied with batteries, also saved them 700 pounds a company. The Marines are making energy where you are and making energy where you fight so you don’t have to be resupplied as much. That’s not a push anymore. They’re out there just doing it.

You go on board a ship and one of the things they’re proudest of is how they’re using fuel. These are efficiencies, but it’s also biofuel at sea is sort of the new normal. Ships don’t know when they’re getting it and when they’re not today. And the last biofuel we paid for, we paid $1.99 a gallon for it. All those folks that were yelling at me in 2012 for paying $25 a gallon for demonstrating biofuels at RIMPAC in 2012 – haven’t heard from them.
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What accomplishments are you most worried about that could get swept away after you're gone? The elimination this fall of ratings for sailors?

That didn’t come from me, that didn’t come from CNO [Adm. John Richardson], that came from MCPON [Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Mike Stevens] trying to make careers more flexible, trying to allow more promotions, trying to allow more choice in the next duty station and trying to get people, when they get ready to leave, an easier transition out. There's a lot of goodness in it. If you want to roll that back, you roll it back. I think that if it goes forward, then in three or four years people will wonder what all the fuss was about. They will be much happier with their career. If it gets rolled back, they’ll never see the changes and there won’t be the angst.
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