Terry Gerton The Navy has just put out a detailed shipbuilding plan, and AEI has published a critique of it at the highest overview level. What would you say the headlines are?

Anand Toprani The headlines of this plan are what I would say is an attempt to try to increase the size of the fleet beyond the Biden administration’s target of roughly 380 ships. Now we’re seeing a sort of total force of about 450 ships and a significant number of them are going to be unmanned systems as well. But the big headline I would are two things. One is a massive increase in the shipbuilding budget from roughly in the $40 billion — mid 40s to over $60 billion a year. And the inclusion of the Trump-class battleships into the shipbuilding plan. This is an attempt to try to articulate what the so-called Golden Street would actually look like.

Terry Gerton The paper describes its critique in four categories, the good, the bad, the vague and the ugly. So let’s kind of take those in order. Let’s start with the good and it has to do with the industrial base. Walk us through what you’re seeing there.

Anand Toprani Well, I think there’s an acknowledgement that there’s two major constraints limiting the Navy’s ability to sort of generate new forces. One is the sort of the problems within the shipyards themselves in terms of the acquisition of labor and most importantly, the retention of skilled labor, but also decrepit and decaying infrastructure, particularly in our public yards, but even in our private yards to a large extent. So you’re seeing this sort of real constraint on our ability, not just to create additional forces, but also just to keep the fleet where it is, to keep pace with the number of retirements, which happened inexorably. Whether or not you build a new ship, the ships you have are going to retire, are going to age out, they have to be replaced. So there’s problems within the yards, but there’s also wider problems within the defense industry as a whole, the way it operates, the way defense acquisition and procurement works, whether or not we are actually getting the best bang for our buck. So I’d say, again, there are two sort of broad problems as an infrastructure problem within the shipyards themselves, infrastructure is both physical and human, but also wider issues about how it is we manage defense. And there’s an attempt on the part of the plant to talk about these issues, perhaps in a more detailed way in the past. And that is certainly a welcome acknowledgment of the problems that we face.

Terry Gerton Acknowledging the problem is always the first step on the path to recovery, but throwing an extra $20 billion at an insufficient industrial base doesn’t seem like a path to solution. Does the plan have or articulate any particular strategy for strengthening that industrial base other than just spending more money?

Anand Toprani I mean, it talks about, well, we need to actually not just recruit workers, but we need to actually retain them. I mean it makes a rhetorical commitment towards doing that. But having actually visited one of these shipyards and talked about the issues that they confront. I mean you know, I still remember somebody at Electric Boat telling me, you know, we pay a kid $18 to paint a submarine. And I thought, I didn’t realize that painting a submarine is actually a very complicated sort of thing. It’s not just like painting your house, painting your wall. This is, you know, we offer a kid, $18 to paint a submarine, they can go down the road to Burger King and earn that much. I mean, we’re just not going to be able to compete at the prices that we pay. And so one one of the problems you’re seeing is, are you actually able to offer people enough money to be able to sort of retain them, even once you’ve recruited them, the numbers I saw from electric boat in terms of how many people they’re bringing into average classes and how many are actually staying with the job. I mean, there’s a catastrophic sort of mismatch between how many people you bring in and how people stay. And so the work is dirty, dangerous work. I think we really need to acknowledge that shipyards are still in many respects 19th Century workplace environments, it’s not a job that I would want to do, and I studied this for a living. It’s not job I would WANT other people necessarily to do considering just, again, how difficult the work is. And so if you’re going to actually do something about that retention problem, you’ve really got to modernize the infrastructure as well, but you’ve also got to break out of the system where you’ve got to be able to pay these people enough so that they’re willing to stay. And the portion of the problem we’re running into is that a lot of these contracts that we have are cost plus contracts which very clearly stipulate how much you can actually pay these people. Unless you work on a different incentive structure, one that sort of encourages people to see or seek efficiencies at the expense of accepting higher profit rates, you’re really not going to be able to deal with the retention problem. And this also has to do, if I may, with the overhead issue as well. You know … the shipbuilding report makes an argument that we saw in the 1980s, that we want to try to encourage firms to invest more of their own money and reduce the government’s overhead costs. And that all sounds well and fine. I mean, why is the government paying for overhead when in the private sector, you would never pay for an overhead, you pay for the product. So there’s a nice effort in the Shipbuilding Plan to say, yes, we should reduce our are the investment burden of the government pays but the flip side to that coin is you have to guarantee higher profits for firms otherwise they’re not going to make these investments and guaranteeing higher firsts for defense contractors who are already over budget, behind schedule, and have all sorts of negative press going back all the way to the merchants of death a hundred years ago is just simply not a winning political philosophy. So there’s, again, you’re gesturing towards some of the problems we face in terms of generating new forces, but it’s sort of half-hearted and not entirely well thought out because, as I keep reminding people, there are no new ideas in defense. There’s just new ways of talking about the old problems. And I think it’s really important that we step back and we look at these are problems we’ve had for a long time. Why were we not able to solve them in the past? And I think that’s going to be a problem. I think no matter how much we spend, it’s not going to generate the desired outcomes.

Terry Gerton I’m really glad we started with the good there. What might you have to say about the bad?

Anand Toprani So when it comes to the bad, I would say that there is an unimpressive level of jargon in this report, which sounds, which must have sounded good when you were creating PowerPoint slides. But actually, if you actually try to implement it, I’m not certain you’re going to actually be able to. You haven’t really thought through what the political ramifications of what it is you’re saying are. So when you talk about sort of moving away from a compliance based architecture towards a warfighting architecture, you know, this is one where requirements are sort of generated by warfighters. And we want to stop having bureaucrats tell us what we’re doing and have input from the warfighter. Now this is a point I didn’t make in the report, but I’ll make it right now, even though it’ll get me in a bit of trouble, one of the problems the Germans had in World War II was they listened to what the warfighter had to say. And the warfighter is interested in taking combat data and making constant adjustments based on what their experience is in combat. And what you end up having with the Germans is incredibly over-designed, baroque military systems that are constantly sort of being modified. You’re not able to actually capture the benefits of economies of scale and long production runs. And so, you know, and this is a point that past Navy executives have made to me is that any sort of inputs that are going to come from the war fighter that are not informed by sort of engineering, real profound engineering knowledge are actually not going to sort of, you now, do what it is you want. They’re not going to actually create changes that that you can actually implement at a physical sort of level. But there’s also this idea of somehow we need to speed up this process, we need to sort of, you know, stop removing all of these different layers that are holding back the acquisition process, what have you. And this is a point that one of my mentors in defense always made is that, you can speed up the process by limiting the number of people who have a say in what goes on. But the problem in Washington is, once you start saying that certain people no longer have a say, they get very upset. And so the question is, who is not going to have a say? Is it going to be the Navy? Is going to be the Joint Staff? Is gonna be OSD or OSW, depending on what the FDA says, is it going to be Congress? Which congressional committees? Is it going be OMB? There are lots of people with a vested interest because this is public money. And once you reduce levels of oversight over how public monies are spent, you generate a lot of political pushback. And that is not something that is, you know, spelled out. If you want this thing to be faster, who is going to suffer as a result? It’s not spelled out, two other problems I’d say in terms of what’s bad about this report. I’d say that again, it repeats this mythology of, you know the big problem that we have in defense is we don’t have a steady demand signal. And if we had a steady demand signal, firms would invest appropriately. Well, the problem is for the better part of the decade, we’ve had a steady demand signals for manned attack and ballistic missile submarines. And as far as we can tell production doesn’t stay level. It doesn’t go up. It goes down. Right? Steady demand has not increased the number of Virginias. Steady demand is not going to, you know, stop schedule slippages in Columbia. That has to do with the earlier sort of infrastructure problems that I’m saying. And again, it’s the reliance on corporate jargon or current OSW buzzwords about war fighting and lethality don’t actually address the sort of real bottlenecks that we confront. And finally, yes, there is more than just a simple, a rhetorical commitment towards using unmanned systems, RASs, UAVs, whatever, like, there’s all sorts of different, you know, buzzwords and terms that we use. There are going to be some robotic autonomous systems in this plan. But they’re only going to be a fraction of the Navy’s sort of total battle force. You’re talking about roughly 80 RAS systems for 300 manned battle force ships. I mean, that’s not a huge amount of ships and you sort of think to yourself well I thought the whole point about robotic autonomous systems is that you can build lots of them because they’re a lot cheaper. But if we’re only building a tiny fraction of them compared to our manned ships, that implies that they’re not cheaper, and they’re not attritable. So we’re creating more expensive ships that we can’t afford to lose necessarily. There’s no sort of concept that’s spelled out, and maybe they can in a plan, for how you would actually use these systems and it’s it seems like if we’re thinking about well, what are the lessons about how to use these systems based on what it is we’ve seen during current combat operations, it would seem like the value of these systems is generating mass and accepting heavy amounts of attrition in order to achieve specific combat outcomes. You’re not going to be able to achieve mass and accept attrition if you’ve only got 80 robotic, you know RAS systems. So, you know, the term I use, which I’m going to copyright is, you know, this is just a traditional Navy shipbuilding plan, with a little bit of drone washing. And ultimately, if you look at the balance of page, if you just look at a pages of the page counts in this plan, where is the emphasis? The emphasis is on building the same ships that we have been building for decades. And again, are these, leaving aside whether or not we can actually build and maintain those ships, are those the correct ships for the challenges the Navy is going to be facing in the future? Remains to be seen.

Terry Gerton Anand Toprani is the Jeanne Kirkpatrick Fellow at AEI. Anand, I want to follow on what you’re just talking about there because you were emphatic in your consideration of what the war fighter has to say about these ships. We’ve just been engaged in pretty significant naval operations in the Strait of Hormuz and in and around the Med, and there’s certainly a vision that future conflict will have a significant role for the Navy. What lessons are we learning from current ops that you would expect to see in this shipbuilding plan, but maybe don’t?

Anand Toprani So, this is maybe going to shock your readers, but I’m taking it from a close friend in the service whose opinion I respect. The Navy is going through, has suffered one of the greatest humiliations of the post-war era recently. I just want to be very clear, what happened during the war with Iran was a catastrophe for the Navy. Not in terms of the number of ships, you know, thank God we didn’t lose any ships. Thank God we were able to sort of keep casualties, you know, at a fairly manageable level. But a catastrophe in terms of what is the Navy supposed to do? How do we justify having this large, not only a large Navy, but a Navy that is capable of operating around the world, forming all these sets of complex missions? We said that, first and foremost, the Navy is about preserving sea lines of communication, about freedom of navigation, about allowing global trade to flow because America is a maritime nation and our interest depends on access to overseas markets and overseas resources and what’s the Navy to do. The Navy was put in a situation where you need to promotes sea control, one of your basic core missions, and we fail. When the Navy can no longer do sea control over one of the world’s most important global maritime choke points, the game is up. I cannot tell you at a conceptual level how horrific this setback was, because honestly what is the Navy going to say in future? If I’m sitting in Congress and I hear some admiral talking about, well, we need to do all this because we need to preserve sea lines of communication. Well, you already had that opportunity and you were unable to. Are you going to be able to do better in future and here’s the problem. I’m not certain that we’re going to be able to do better in the future, not at a cost, at a political cost that we are willing to bear. Because what we’re seeing about the nature of sort of modern warfare and the proliferation of these sort of systems and weapons, which again is not a recent thing, but we’re finally, I think, reaching a, I hate to use this term, but it’s sort of a tipping point where we’re not able to pretend that we can do things the way that we used to. Remember. The idea of using over-the-horizon sort of, you know, missiles or attack ships, that goes all the way back to 1967. Elmo Zumwalt said, hey, you know, when the Egyptians sank an Israeli destroyer with missiles that were fired from the harbor that the destroyer didn’t see, he said, this is a new era of warfare. And 60 years later, that new area might actually have arrived so you’re in this position where you have these missiles and drones that are being fired that you cannot see until they are right upon you. There are significant numbers of them that are going to be coming at you. The cost exchange just doesn’t work and so sea control depends on your ability to basically control the land from which those missiles and drones are being launched, but what we’re seeing, what we also saw based on what was released in the open sources, actually degrading Iran’s ability to fire these missiles and drones, destroying the launchers and sites proved to be incredibly difficult, as it has been throughout history. You know, the great piece I read, you know, on a Substack about how, you know, we failed during World War [II] to hunt German V1 and V2 launch systems, because it turned out they moved them around, and it was very hard to find them. We had these kinds of problems hunting for Scuds during the Gulf War. And now what do we see? We have these same problems hunting for launchers in a cluttered ground environment. And so if you’re not actually able to project power effectively on land, which would entail massive bombing campaigns and the insertion of ground trips, you’re actually gonna be able to achieve sea control in contested areas like Hormuz. And so I think maybe this is a way to solve this problem. I don’t know that there is, but it seems like right now, the Navy is at a sort of, you know, genuine crisis point. And this all comes back to the idea of, well, what exactly is this Navy supposed to do. And traditionally, there are four missions that the Navy focuses on. There’s sea control. There’s power projection, taking your stuff from sea and hitting targets on land. There’s naval presence, a crisis response. And then there’s finally deterrence, which is a sort of separate mission for ballistic missile submarines. What I’m concerned about is, are we actually going to be able to do sea control in contested areas right now? Because we saw It was incredibly difficult to do that against Iran. Remember, Iran was able to achieve these effects in Hormuz, not by closing Hormuz in the sense of like, there was an impenetrable wall of mines that were sinking every single ship, you simply create a situation where, just like in the Black Sea, the risk was too high. And if private firms are not willing to accept that risk the cargoes, yes, some ships will get through, but we never managed to get more than a tiny portion of you know of the daily traffic through Hormuz at any given point in time. And so you create a situations where these scenarios where access is constrained, and private firms are not willing to accept those risks. And there’s very little the Navy can do if you’re fighting a kind of limited war to deal with those problems. So, again, I think the Navy’s in a real sort of crisis situation in terms of can it still do things like sea control, things that we would have considered feasible in the past? Is power projection possible or politically acceptable? In the case of Iran, I don’t think it was. I don’t think, you know, for us to have expanded the word to that level would have sort of totally defeated the purpose. And so again, conceptual level of what is the Navy supposed to do? Can it actually achieve that in the contemporary naval environment, naval warfare environment? I’m not entirely sure.

Terry Gerton And so just to kind of close this out, then I think that gets us to the ugly part, which although the paper is very specific in certain critiques, I think gets to what you just highlighted, which is this is a plan that doesn’t answer the right problem or the right question. So how do we get Navy thought leaders, members of Congress, the defense establishment to rethink what it means to field a national navy?

Anand Toprani So, among my mentors, in terms of naval warfare, an analyst makes an argument, which I wish this plan also took seriously, which is that we conceive of naval power using the wrong metric. We think ships equal power, and that is actually not how it works. So the focus on hulls is, if anything, counterproductive. The argument he uses that I know other people, other naval analysts in the D.C. area uses, you measure power in terms of actual missile launchers and tubes, you measure it in terms of your ability to actually destroy the enemy. It’s not hulls that matter. It’s launchers that matter, it’s inventories that matter. It’s the nature of your munitions mix that matters. The ships are not an end of themselves. They’re just a means towards an end. But we’re caught in this sort of trap where we can only conceive a naval power using ships, because there’s an entire political economy based around the idea that building ships is what the Navy has to do. And as long as we build enough ships, the Navy will figure out how to accomplish all of these, you know, political aims and overcome these technological, you know and triumph in the sort of technological battlefield. And I think that is a real problematic way of looking at it because you’re locked into doing things that you’ve always been doing in the past. The shipyards are organized to build certain kinds of ships. The way that contracts are allocated happens in certain ways, you know, the industry has evolved in a certain way to produce the existing force mix. You know, one of the most interesting things I learned when I visit Electric Boat is we claim to have two shipyards building attack submarines, Newport News and Electric Boat. What we actually have is just one shipyard. Assembling modules that are built in Quonset and in Newport News and are floated to Groton and assembled. In a sense, the firms have, they have reacted very logically and they have simply integrated production entirely. Towards you know, towards achieving a certain outcome. So again, I think the most important thing we have to do is we need to ask ourselves, what exactly are the kinds of tasks that our Navy has to accomplish? Are you actually interested in sea control in a contested environment? That requires a certain mix. Are you interested in sea denial, about preventing an enemy from using the sea for their objectives, like an enemy might do in a Western Pacific scenario involving Taiwan? Are you interested simply in maintaining control of the blue water and seeding the littorals to an adversary? That requires a different force mix as well like one of the problems that we saw is like you know if you’re going to do a blockade, a blockade is a very labor-intensive kind of thing. You need lots of sailors, you need lots of ships, and you need a lot of low-end stuff to be able to do that. And again, the report talks about a high-low mix, an idea that, again, goes back to the 1970s. There’s no new ideas in defense. But what do I see in this report? I see lots of the high-end, very little discussion of what the low end means, because again, low end ships don’t necessarily generate the same kinds of contracts and employment that high-end ships would do as well. They might bring in new entrants into the industry, which would disrupt the existing model. So again, what is this Navy actually supposed to do? And are we using the right metrics to measure combat effectiveness? And I’d say that again, based on the kinds of scenarios that the Navy is actually planning for, I’d say numbers of hulls are not the most important thing, it’s your ability to generate actual lethality and your ability not to be killed, not to be seen. Those are the things that matter, you know, first and foremost. And again, that’s not a function of how many hulls you have. It’s a question of what kinds of hulls you have and how you’re planning to use them.