Defense Writers Group

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1 TRANSCRIPT Defense Writers Group A Project of the Center for Media & Security New York and Washington, D.C. The Honorable Ray Mabus Secretary of the Navy September 30, 2014 THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT AND MAY CONTAIN ERRORS. USERS ARE ADVISED TO CONSULT THEIR OWN TAPES OR NOTES OF THE SESSION IF ABSOLUTE VERIFICATION OF WORDING IS NEEDED. Secretary Mabus: -- Navy s role in, against ISIL, ISIS, IL, whatever, or IS, whatever it s called today, is because we were already there. We could move almost instantly when the President gave the order. We can stay for as long as we need to stay based on the normal rotation of our ships. We have a carrier strike group in the region. We have an amphibious ready group in the region which we, both of which we always have in that region of the world. And it is sustainable for as long as we need to be there. That s what forward presence gives. We don t take up anybody else s land. We can come from the sea and we can stay for a very very long time. DWG: Current operations. What can you tell us about your role in that? Secretary Mabus: We re flying obviously strikes off the Bush. We re flying some ISR missions against ISIL. And I think that s about all I can comfortably say. We ve, obviously it s been announced before that we ve got, we ve got the embassy in security in Iraq with Marines, things like that. And we continue to -- the relief of the Bush, the carrier that s relieving the Bush, the Vinson, is on its way. DWG: Sir, did you launch any Tomahawks after day one? Secretary Mabus: No. DWG: Just a couple of questions on ops. There s been a fixation on cost of the operation from among the press and the public. What are the incremental costs, roughly, that the Bush has accumulated since August 8 th, over and above what it would have accumulated had it just been in the AOR supporting Afghanistan? Secretary Mabus: A very fair question and I ll answer it not just the Bush but also the Tomahawk shooters. It s less than $100 million. Less than $100 million for Navy now.

2 DWG: Cumulative since August -- Secretary Mabus: Cumulative. Those are the incremental costs, and it s mostly weapons. Some gasoline to fly the extra missions that, we re flying more missions than we would have been flying, but it s mainly the weapons. It s mainly the Tomahawks and the ordnance that our planes are dropping. DWG: So 47 Tomahawks at a million apiece, so that s like half of it. Secretary Mabus: A little bit more than a million apiece. DWG: $1.1, yeah. Secretary Mabus: The weapons are the vast majority of it. DWG: Okay. One follow-up, does the Navy see the need for a second carrier. To retain a second carrier presence there to support Afghan operations? We haven t had a second carrier there in about two years I think now, or a year and a half. Secretary Mabus: Right now we can do whatever we need to do with one carrier. DWG: You ve told that to Hagel and the National Command Authority? Secretary Mabus: I m absolutely certain that they know what we can do if we need more or if there are more missions. We ll take a look at that then. DWG: But at this point there s no plan to surge a second carrier to support Afghanistan? Secretary Mabus: At this point, no. DWG: Thank. DWG: Last week Secretary Hagel said he was doing a long term budget analysis for the ISIL campaign. What is the Navy s piece of this? What is going to be the next to do for this? Secretary Mabus: Again, it s, for Navy and for the Marines it would be the incremental cost of extra sorties, weapons, things like that. We ve already, we were going to have a carrier in the region, or in the Arabian Gulf or in Central Command no matter what. We were going to have a strike group there. We were going to have an amphibious ready group there. We rotate those out on a pretty routine basis and so it would be the incremental costs that Tony asked about. DWG: When do you have to submit that [inaudible]? 2

3 Secretary Mabus: I don t have a date for you on that. Our costs are pretty straightforward though about that. DWG: I m actually not going to ask about Iraq. Navy Special Warfare was -- Secretary Mabus: Bummer. DWG: Too bad. [Laughter]. DWG: Naval Special Warfare is supposed to finish the study about integrating women this summer and I was wondering if it s been finished, if you ve been briefed, what the time line is now. Secretary Mabus: I have not been briefed. I think the time line, the overall time line remains start of 16 in terms of making decisions on this. What I would point out is that Navy Special Warfare is the only part of Navy now closed to women. That we ve opened everything else up including submarines and riverine to women. And so it s that one particular unit. What Secretary Panetta said when he signed the thing out, the presumption is that everything will open unless there s a specific reason for it to be closed and that s the way we re proceeding on the look at it. DWG: So the study today sometime. I ve been asking them and they haven t been able to give me a straight answer about whether they ve -- Secretary Mabus: I don t know. I ll give you that answer. I know I have not been briefed on it. DWG: Mr. Secretary, thanks again for spending the time. On the Pacific rebalance, just kind of looking for your perspective on how you think it s going so far, what s the big milestone coming up next year, and what do you really need out there besides money, of course, but what s your number one, two, or three priorities going in the next two or three years? What do you see the need after doing this for a couple of years now? Secretary Mabus: I ll give you some milestones that are either coming up or have already passed. We did the Freedom deployment to Singapore which was very successful. That was an eight month deployment and we validated the concept of changing crews, leaving the ship where it is. We sent LCS-2, Independence, to RIMPAC and validated there. We gave them very short notice to change out weapons packages in San Diego and head to RIMPAC and they got there with a third of their fuel left and they got there faster than anticipated. 3

4 We will have the first LCS forward deployed in Singapore before the end of this year. It will be followed by three more that will be there by about the close of 16 will be all four. We re going to be putting some additional ships into Japan, into Yokosuka. There will be an additional amphibious ready group in the Pacific. The homeport of that has not been decided yet. The rotation presence of the Marines in Darwin, Australia started out at a company level, about 200. The one just finished, we had about 1200 Marines there. That s moving on to -- DWG: Was that March that the rest [inaudible] -- Has that been incremental or do they kind of all go down in March? The 1200 that are there now. Secretary Mabus: No, they went as a unit. And then that will be increasing over the next couple of years to around 2400 Marines, depending on exactly what units and exactly what equipment is sent in. The Guam Master Plan has been sent to the Hill and the planning work for the rotational presence some form of presence of Marines on Guam are being finalized. The Mayor of, the Governor of Okinawa has signed the Environmental Impact Statement to do the Futenma replacement facility. So that work in connection with Guam, in connection with the other Marine moves in the Pacific is beginning to move ahead, although that s a year-long process. We are a little over 55 percent of the fleet in the Pacific today. By 2020 we should be right at 60 percent in the Pacific. And we re sending a lot of our new platforms there, our newest platforms. Things like Littoral Combat Ships, rebuilds. The USS America is going to be commissioned a week from Saturday in San Francisco and it will be homeported in San Diego. The P-8s are beginning to arrive in theater, in the Pacific first. The priorities are sort of, to answer the first question, so that we can have presence everywhere that we need to, so that those big gray hulls will be on the horizon, so that we will be virtually everywhere in the Pacific all the time. And so that if there is an incident, a crisis, we can respond and we don t escalate because we ve already got ships there. DWG: Good morning. I was interested in the Tomahawk strikes. Can you speak to why the need for Tomahawks in those particular instances as opposed to just more airstrikes? Secretary Mabus: I don t know why those were chose as opposed to air, but Tomahawk s a great weapon and very precise. And as I think John Kirby said, we hit exactly what we were aiming to hit with those strikes. It gives you an amazing capability in that precision. 4

5 DWG: A quick follow-up, if you could speak to the cross-country flight that you had that landed in Maryland within the last week or so. I know the Navy announced that. It seemed to get a lot of interest. Any after-action on that? Secretary Mabus: No, except it made it fine all the way across the country, and we re going to continue -- It came to Pax River for extensive testing which is what we do at Pax River, but there were no UFO sightings or anything like that. [Laughter]. DWG: Thank you. DWG: Good morning, sir. Can you please talk about, do you have a sense of precisely or even sort of roughly what the component of the Navy and Marine Corps flights have been in the airstrikes in Syria? Secretary Mabus: You mean -- DWG: Of the total airstrikes, what percentage have been Navy and Marine Corps flights? Secretary Mabus: I think we ve been about a total, about a quarter of the airstrikes. We were, most of them at the beginning of the campaign because, as I said, we were there. But as the campaign has gone on, I think the Air Force announced yesterday they d done about 75 percent so the rest would be Navy and Marine. DWG: Of the quarter, is there any particular sway between Navy and Marine Corps aircraft? Or -- Secretary Mabus: I m not sure I can give you a breakdown. I think most of them have come off the carrier. The Bush does not have a Marine squadron. So it would be more Navy than Marines, but I can t give you a percentage. DWG: To follow-up, have your aircraft had any interaction with Syrian government military? By radar or interactions in the air? Secretary Mabus: Not to my knowledge. DWG: Thank you, sir. DWG: Mr. Secretary, I want to ask you about something we ve talked a lot about over the past year plus in town, which is the number of aircraft carriers the Navy needs or should have, and I wonder if you think the operations in Iraq and Syria will change the discussion that you and the department had with Congress in the size of that fleet and the amount of resources that it gets, or whether you think it should change the discussion because clearly, as you have described this morning, CVN-77 is out there making the case for aircraft carriers. Or was it ever a case of actually convincing people in Congress? It was just a pure money issue? 5

6 Secretary Mabus: I think more the very latter part of that question. To start with there s a law that says we ve got to have 11 carriers. It s like gravity. It s not just a good idea, it s the law. And that s the basis that you have to go on. I think Congress made their intent pretty clear this year in terms of the George Washington which is the next carrier up to be refueled and have a complex overhaul done. They very specifically said that the only work that could be done with the money that they allocated was work to do the refueling and to keep the GW. The Navy wants the GW. The Navy wants the 11 th carrier, was a purely financial thing. That was one of the few places you can go to get that amount of money. But as I said, I think Congress has made the case pretty clearly, we 11 to have the constant presence that we need. We need 11 to get them into a more regular cycle of maintenance and training. We ve got 10 now. We ve got a waiver from Congress because we retired the Enterprise last December. The Ford doesn t come on until 16. So to keep from basically wearing out these things before their life span is over, to keep from wearing out the crews and their supporting strike groups. It s one of the reasons we ve gone to this thing that, I wish I could fine tune names of these things. But the Optimized Fleet Response Plan that -- I know I don t -- [Laughter]. That says that notionally or nominally that we ll, the carrier and the strike group, and we re starting with carriers and the strike groups. We plan to move it to all ships, that for a 36 month period here s when they ll be in maintenance, here s when you ll do the training and the workup, here s when you ll be deployed, here s when you ll be at high readiness when you come back to act as a surge, and then here s when you ll start to cycle again. It s to give some predictability. Now the world gets a vote and you may not be able to do that, but it s to give some predictability both to the sailors that go out, but also in terms of our maintenance and in terms of when we refuel and in terms of making sure that we get the total life span out of those ships because they re supposed to last for 50 years and we ve got to make sure that they do. DWG: Do you think that putting the carrier on the block and the threat of the Navy losing a carrier will go away as a political issue after the Syria and Iraq operation? Secretary Mabus: Well, the issue is, Congress has given us enough money to get started on the GW to do the long lead time equipment, to get ready for the GW to come back, to go into, again, RCOH, refueling and complex overhaul. What we don t have yet is the rest of the money, which is several billion dollars, to not only do the complete overhaul and the refueling but also keep the air wing, the sailors that are involved in the carrier. But going forward, certainly our plan is to keep the carrier. That was unambiguous from Congress. DWG: Yes, sir, I think it was earlier this month the Navy celebrated the 4000 th patrol of the boomers. Sequestration is not going away. The Navy and the Air Force have 6

7 made it clear to the Hill that they re not going to be able to recapitalize the nuclear triad if the caps remain in place. Are you guys just going to wait until you re forced to do something? Or is somebody going to take the initiative and say maybe it s time to rethink the triad. Maybe we don t need all three of these legs given the type of wars we ve been fighting for the last 25 years. Secretary Mabus: I won t presume to speak for the Air Force, but I will speak for the Navy here. One of the things that the CNO and I both have been saying is that, not that we can t recapitalize that, but if we do and it comes completely out of Navy that we re going to break something else. That we re going to either break our shipbuilding budget because it will take more than half of what we normally get for shipbuilding over a 12 year period, or we ll break something else if you keep the shipbuilding budget up. But it s a very large bill. And the boomers are the most survivable leg of that triad. This is a national mission. This is a national program. And what we ve said, I ve said in testimony on the Hill, so has the CNO. We ve got to have this debate now about how we pay for this because we re not waiting. We re spending several billion dollars over this five year period doing the science and technology, doing the research and development, and doing the initial designs. We ve got -- And it s not just us. The British are in this too because we ve got a common missile compartment. The British are ahead of us in terms of when their first recapitalized sub, their Vanguard replacement program has to come on-line to keep their strategic deterrence up. I think we ve been pretty clear about what the impacts of this are going to be and also that we can t wait until 21 which is when we start building the first of these to have this debate, because we re beginning to spend the money now. DWG: That s the money side of the debate. The question is the need for the triad. Secretary Mabus: I understand that. DWG: -- taking a blood oath, you neither one will say we don t need it? [Laughter]. You guys plainly have the most survivable leg. If you had to go to an ONAD, God forbid, it would be the boomers. But it seems that this is sort of radioactive, no pun intended -- [Laughter] -- even as the budget pressures tighten. Secretary Mabus: I guess what I would say is that whatever decision is made on that is not going to be made at my level. DWG: Do you have an opinion? Secretary Mabus: It won t be made at my level. That s my opinion. [Laughter]. Secretary Mabus: But I will give you an opinion on the Navy/Air Force game this week. [Laughter]. 7

8 DWG: Are you going to that, sir? Secretary Mabus: No. DWG: Secretary, one follow-up. On the question of Naval Special Warfare and the women issue, you said the decision would be made in 16 and the assumption is that everything will be open. But there is an escape clause in that that you can give a reason why you cannot do that. You re not saying at this point that Special Warfare will be open. Secretary Mabus: No, I m not, but I do know which way the presumption goes with Secretary Panetta. And in my opinion, if people meet the qualifications, then I don t think gender should matter. Now I m going to pivot to the [inaudible] here. One of the things that I m concerned about is we don t have enough women in the Navy or the Marine Corps, and we are working pretty hard to identify number one, the reasons for that; and number two, to do something about it. Part of the reason is that there are just not enough, so there s not the critical mass that you need. Women are about 18 percent of the Navy, about 8 percent of the Marine Corps. But there are also reasons that we don t retain women as well as we do men at about the eight to twelve year mark. And it s not just women. We need to do a better job of managing our force. We re going to have to have some help from Congress on some of these things. We have a career intermission program now, but it s a pilot program, and basically nobody trusts us to continue that program. It s a pilot program, Congress designated it as a pilot. Now the people who have gone through it have done great. The first person that went through it came out, and when she came out she was promoted to captain and given major command. So it clearly didn t have a negative impact on her career. But we have not been able to fill up the slots on that primarily because it is a pilot program and nobody thinks it s going to be around, or it might not be if you go into it. We ve got to be more flexible I think in how we manage people s career. Right now it s pretty rigid. No matter what community you re in you ve got to check certain blocks. You ve got to do certain things in order. And we don t allow for much slippage for anything, whether it s family or education or anything else. I ll give you one non-gender example. You come out of the Naval Academy and you get a Rhodes Scholarship, or a Marshall or an Olmstead or something. And you go away to Oxford or somewhere for two years. When you come back, you are very severely disadvantaged because you are still measured against your peers that you graduated with. So they ve been, if they re surface, they ve been on at least one deployment. If they re pilots they ve gotten their wings. If they re submariners they ve gotten their dolphins and they re deployed. 8

9 We need a way that you can give people, you know, reward people for being that good academically and reset them so that their peer group is the ones they start with after that education. Or if you take two or three years off, your peer group is the one you come back with. Same thing with moving from the active component to the reserve and back, that you can -- That ought to be way easier. And I will give you a great example of someone who s had broken service. Anybody know? The Commandant of the Marine Corps. The Commandant of the Marine Corps took more than two years out of the Marines and went and flew for an airline. DWG: That isn t, of course, my main question. Secretary Mabus: I know. [Laughter]. I was just using you, Otto. DWG: You re trying to set eight months as a maximum tour, deployment period. You ve extended I think the Bataan ARG and the Bush may be extended. We used to think six months was the standard, then it pushed to seven, now you re saying eight and you re pushing it into nine. How long can you do that without grinding your kids down? In Vietnam we did a 10, 11 month cruise and then everybody went home and never came back. How long can you continue doing this eight, nine months? Secretary Mabus: I was in, during Vietnam I was not in Vietnam, but a lot of folks off my ship went home and never came back too, but there were other reasons for it then. Otto, to give you a serious answer, the length of deployments has gone up and one of the things that I get from doing the literally hundreds and hundreds of All Hands Calls that I do is it s not so much the length as it is the certainty of how long is the deployment going to be. As I said in answer to an earlier question, the world gets a vote. Sometimes you re going to have to extend. For example the Bataan, and this is the second consecutive cruise they ve been extended. And it s one of the reasons we ve gone to this optimized fleet deployment plan, or are going to it. But it s also one of the reasons we now have hardship duty pay. It s high -- DWG: High deployment pay tempo. Secretary Mabus: That s what I thought it was too, then I got a read-ahead that said it was hardship duty pay. DWG: It s hardship now? Secretary Mabus: Anyway, I don t know. It s called -- again, I don t name these things. 9

10 DWG: [Inaudible]. It rolls off the tongue. Secretary Mabus: It s just one of those things you can t get out of your head. It s like a song. But we ve said that if you re at sea for more than 220 days in a row that we re going to begin to give you this extra pay. 220 days is a little less than eight months at sea. If the deployment goes past that we think you should get something extra for it. It s also the reason we ve gone to the career sea pay. If you re assigned to a seagoing billet for more than three years consecutively, you re going to get extra pay if you re E5 and above and you ve had eight years at sea or assigned to a seagoing billet, you re going to get extra pay every time you re assigned to a seagoing billet. Again, these sailors will do whatever job they re asked to do. But more certainty in terms of how long the deployment s going to be, more of a notion of when the deployment is going to be is the thing I get asked more than the length of the deployment. DWG: I have a question about the Special Warfare and women. The Army has recently opened up its Ranger School to women candidates. They re calling for applications by December, presumably with a spring course in mind. And that s ostensibly with the notion of developing some kind of critical mass. We re seeing that there s not a critical mass right now for Navy women. Do you find any of that inspirational, interesting, instructing? Secretary Mabus: Don t make me say I find something in the Army educational. [Laughter]. No, I think a better analogy to the Ranger School is what the Marines are doing with their Infantry, both for officers and enlisted, they re recruiting more to go through in the Infantry School coming out of boot camp for enlisted or Infantry Officer School right after basic school. So trying to get that base of experience. It s hard. It s hard for the Marines, it s going to be hard for the Army because if you go through that and then you can t do that at the end, then you ve got to go back and do your other, whatever other specialty you re going to have. Then you ve got to go back and do a second set of training. I think it s -- It s just harder to recruit people if they re not going to get to use those skills when they come out. The thing I keep saying about the SEALS, about Special Warfare. More than 80 percent of men don t make it. So we know what the standards are. If you can make it, I don t see where gender has much of a place. But again, I m going to wait for the study that I ve not been briefed on yet. 10

11 DWG: I guess when it comes to Rangers, the idea is wow, now women can wear this Ranger tab. It gives some amount of street credibility I guess. Do you see any place for that in Navy Special Warfare? At some point too, if you re going to ask for that exception come January 2016, these forces are going to have to give some reasons why. Not probably presumably beyond, you know, it s a hard standard, 80 percent of guys don t make it but -- Secretary Mabus: Again, I think a better analogy is what the Marines are doing because of the numbers. DWG: Right, but as it applies to say doing something like the SEAL training, like going through -- Secretary Mabus: Let me see what the initial report has been. DWG: What report are you -- Secretary Mabus: The study that I have not been briefed on yet. I don t know if they finished on time. DWG: I don t think they know -- Secretary Mabus: I hope they don t know if I don t. But I ll just go back to what I said. The presumption goes one way and it s a presumption that I support going that way. And I ve made that pretty clear. In 2010 we made the decision to put women on submarines. We re putting women in riverine craft last year. And those were -- So we re down to one very small community now that s closed to women. And I do think that in all communities, whether surface or sub or air or whatever, that we don t have enough women and that we need to do a better job of recruiting, but also a better job of retaining. DWG: [Inaudible]. I wanted to ask in terms of the pivot to Asia, just -- Secretary Mabus: I think it s a rebalance now. DWG: Oh, rebalance. Secretary Mabus: Right. DWG: So we have the Prime Minister of India that s in the United States, the U.S. has been working on developing a deeper defense relationship with India. We ve reported that the administration [inaudible] in terms of [inaudible] on Vietnam. Can you walk us through where you see opportunities for particular engagements that are Navy oriented, maritime oriented in terms of developing these defense relationships 11

12 in Asia? And are you, do you see any sort of specific opportunities there with those, that would benefit the Navy? Secretary Mabus: We have literally hundreds of these defense exercises going on in the Pacific now, and it s one of the reasons that I travel so much and particularly to the Pacific. I ve been to India twice. I ve been to Vietnam once. And to give you some specific examples, we just had, it s normally a bilateral exercise with the Indian Navy, Malibar. It takes place every year. This year it was a trilateral with Japan and it took place off Japan and not off India. Right now we ve got PHIBLEX going on with, an exercise with the navy and Marines in the Philippines. We ve got that exercise. We ve got things like Cobra Gold with Thailand and the countries around that region. We ve got major exercises with Australia and their forces, with Japan and Korea. If you look at our defense strategy, and you brought up some of the countries that are in there, but if you look at the defense strategy that the President announced in January of 12, there are three major parts to it. One is focus on the Western Pacific; second is focus on the Arabian Gulf; third is build partnerships around the world. I think those three are definition of the Navy and Marine Corps. That s what we do. We have been building these partnerships. We are incredibly active in these. And it s not -- We re certainly in the Western Pacific, we re certainly doing things with India, nascently with Vietnam, things like humanitarian assistance, disaster relief exercises with them. With Japan, with Korea, with the Philippines, with Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh. It s like going around the room and calling out people. I know I m missing some countries here off the top of my head. The number of exercises whether they re passing exercises which is a day or two or a much more complex exercise like RIMPAC which 22 countries came to. We have a real focus on the Western Pacific, a real focus on those countries in the Western Pacific, but it s as a part of this defense strategy. I don t think you ll see that going down any time soon. DWG: You didn t mention China. Secretary Mabus: China came to RIMPAC, right. DWG: -- issues arisen lately with China? Secretary Mabus: One of the things that, I went to China in December of 12, and they were complaining about our reconnaissance. Our intelligence gathering. I said you obviously think it s valuable because you ve sent an intel ship to collect on RIMPAC I said our response was to invite you to the next one. Now China sent four ships to RIMPAC this year. They also sent an intel ship. [Laughter]. It s confusing. 12

13 DWG: To what extent are you concerned by these pro-democracy or concerned, or watching these pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong? And are you taking any kind of action to just [delay] in case that situation spirals? Secretary Mabus: Andrea, I ll go back to my answer to Adam s first question. We re there. We re there whenever -- What we provide the country with is options and presence. We will be present in the Western Pacific. Period. DWG: Mr. Secretary, I wanted to ask you about the Russian [inaudible] on these 12 warships. The United States was strongly opposed to this deal. Can you comment? You [inaudible] on this several weeks ago. What I wanted to ask you is about this idea again, some U.S. and European lawmakers [inaudible] to buy those ships so Russia doesn t get it, doesn t get those ships. Is it something that s being seriously considered here in Washington given the current budget environment? And could you expand a bit on that? Secretary Mabus: I think what I ll say is I ll repeat what I said the last time, which is we are strongly opposed to this sale. And have been for quite a while. And that all options ought to be looked at in terms of how to, in terms of not giving this capability to Russia. DWG: Can you specify what those options are? Secretary Mabus: No. DWG: A two-part question for you. I was wondering if you could give us an update on the Small Surface Combatant Task Force? What you ve learned so far now that the initial phase has been completed? And I also wanted to see if you could provide us some insight on how and why the naval strike missile demonstration was undertook? Secretary Mabus: Number one, the update I ll give you on the Small Surface Combatant Task Force since it was constituted in response to a SecDef directive to me to take a look at small surface combatants, and it has not been briefed to him, I will say that the process has been thorough, exhaustive, and that it is -- Well, it s been thorough and exhaustive. I ll leave it at that. The naval strike missile from Norway, the Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile, was fired off the Coronado and LCS-4 and LCS-2 variant. It was done as part of the foreign competition program that, we look at foreign weapon systems to see how good they are, to see how, if they can be integrated into ours, to see if they re competitive with ours, to see if they re something we ought to look at for systems in the future. It saves us on R&D costs, it saves us on testing and development costs and a lot of different things. We fired it off Coronado, and it was a very successful firing. They fired one at RIMPAC, the Norwegians did at RIMPAC. 13

14 One of the things it shows about the LCS is that you can put different weapons on it very quickly and do things like this. But this was simply a test of that missile to see if going forward on any of our ships, that we should, that this is one of the weapon systems we should take a look at. We re getting all the data back and we ll go through the process of doing that now. DWG: A quick follow-up on the SSC, do you still expect to make some sort of a decision in the next budget submission or -- Secretary Mabus: Yes. Well, we expect to make a recommendation to the Secretary in time for the next budget submission. DWG: Mr. Secretary, you do travel all over the Navy, you do speak to these sailors and their families. In part to Otto s question where you talked about deployment, I m just curious, what else do these kids tell you? These young men and women tell you? What bothers them the most? As I look at transcripts of your All Hands I see an awful lot of questions about sequestration. Secretary Mabus: I think I ll give you several things that I get more than once. I do travel a lot. In fact we went over 900,000 air miles last week different countries and territories. DWG: Last year. Secretary Mabus: No, in five years. In five years. [Laughter]. No, I travel a lot, I don t travel anywhere near that. And I do All Hands Calls everywhere I go. As I said to Otto, they re concerned about predictability in terms of how long will they be out, how will their families know. We stopped a carrier two days before it was supposed to go out two years, ago, and some people had rented their apartments. It s a tough thing to do. So that s one. I do get a lot of, and I get very sophisticated questions about sequestration because they re worried about what effect it will have on them, what effect it will have on the Navy but also on them personally. And if you ve read the transcripts, and I feel sorry for you if you have, I try to tell them exactly where we are. I think sequester is dumb. Most people think it s dumb. But here s where we are in terms of the process. Congress has fixed it for, partially fixed it for 15 and 16, but you know, it s still the law and it will kick back in on January 1, 16. Unless something happens to do that. They also ask some -- And part of that is the size of the Navy. What s the outlook? And one of my answers there is we re growing the fleet. We came down pretty dramatically 14

15 from 2001 to We went from 316 ships to 278 ships. If you count both the active and the reserves we went down by 90,000 sailors over that time. Our plans are that we re right at 324,000 sailors on active duty. That s the number that we need. That s the number that we expect to keep over the next five years. We went through the Enlisted Retention Board and the Perform to Serve which was as unpopular as anything I ve ever seen, and sort of rightfully so. But we had certain ratings that were overmanned and certain that were undermanned and we had to balance the force out. That s over. We ve done that. We ve got a very balanced force. We ve got people where we need them now. We may have to do some one s and two s here and there, but nothing like the Enlisted Retention Boards again. I get questions about retirement, and will I be able to retire under the system that I joined under? What changes are going to be made there? And I tell them that Congress has a study going on about that, but part of that study is that whatever decision is made about retirement, whether there s a change or not, it will not affect the people that -- The system you join under is the system you retire under. And I raise it proactively about pay and benefits, that we re going to have to slow down the growth of that or it s going to begin to -- It s not going to begin, we re there. It s going to begin to, either they re going to get less training or they re going to have fewer weapons, fewer platforms. So their quality of work is going to go down if we don t -- Nobody s talking about cutting, but if we don t slow the rate of increase down. I think most people respond to that. Then I get some things that are not as earth-shattering, but really important. I mean the thing that I ve done that I think increase morale more than any single thing -- I started getting questions, why can t we wear our ball caps with the ship s name on them ashore? Or even on the ship if you re not standing bridge watches? The first two or three times I got it I said, you can t? [Laughter]. They said no. So I came back, asked the CNO. I said why can t folks wear their ball caps ashore? He said, they can t? [Laughter]. So we sent out about a two sentence order that said wear your ball caps. I get thanked for that -- It s a big thing about unit morale, people just appreciated that. I mean leave it to the CO of the unit now, but that was one of the big things that was on their minds. Again, it doesn t go to anything but just sort of pride and morale and things like that. That was an easy fix. DWG: Do you see morale trending up, trending down, or just holding steady? Secretary Mabus: I see morale is very high. It s holding steady but at a very high level. We have the best force we ve ever had, and as I said, they re willing to do anything. You give them an order and they will meet it. They d like some more certainty about what that is, but they are rightfully proud -- both Navy and Marines -- of just what I ve been talking about. That we provide presence. That they are the only Americans a lot of foreigners will ever meet. That they represent the United States 15

16 around the world to a lot of different people. And I think that part of that is the personality you have to have to want to join the Navy or the Marines. The motto of the Navy is not join the Navy and stay home. And I ve put this in a bunch of my speeches. One Asian CNO said that the difference in the soldiers and sailors, are the soldiers by necessity look down. They look at lines on a map or on the ground, they look at obstacles. And the sailors look up. They look at the horizon, they see no boundaries, they see no obstacles, and they want to see what comes next. I think if you ve got that curiosity and that instinct to want to see what s over the horizon that you re going to be pretty happy. If you join the Navy you re already, you re going to get to sea, you re going to deploy DWG: Can I do a quick follow on morale? Secretary Mabus: Sure. DWG: Twenty years ago the six month thing was a real morale-crusher. Have the ships gotten better? And eight months for a sailor today is the equivalent of what six months was 20 years ago? Secretary Mabus: Well the ships have gotten better. I don t think days have gotten any shorter or anything. But I think when you say a morale crusher, I think part of it is what are expectations? What are your expectations when you set sail? And I think things like high deployment pay tempo, or hardship or whatever, to show that there s an understanding that you re doing a lot, that we re asking a lot of you. That there s some appreciation there, some tangible appreciation. And the same thing with the career sea pay and the career sea pay premium. We are the Navy and the Marine Corps. We want you to go to sea. That s what you joined to do. But if you keep volunteering to do that we re going to reward you in some tangible ways for doing it. DWG: Thanks for coming to speak with us. Speaking of the effects of sequestration, how will sequestration affect the Navy s ability to fight [inaudible]? Secretary Mabus: I think this is one of those -- It wouldn t come back in until January 1 st of 16. And there are too many variables between now and then. We ve got the ISIL/ISIS, there s a lot [inaudible] right now. And we ll meet whatever mission the country gives us. DWG: So likely no affect going forward? Secretary Mabus: No, no. That s not what I m saying. It s too far, too far in advance to give you any sort of coherent or reasonable answer on that. DWG: One quick follow-up, the $100 million, is that coming out of the Navy s budget, CENTCOM s budget or OCO? 16

17 Secretary Mabus: Most of it is from OCO. Most of it. Not all of it. Some is out of I think, I think CENTCOM. But most is OCO right now. DWG: You ve been in the position the last several years of defending LCS on the Hill. With the forward deployments, the first one at the end of this year and then three following, are you hoping that shows what the platform can do? Are you hoping to win over the hearts and souls -- Secretary Mabus: I ve been in the happy position of defending the LCS on the Hill. I think these deployments have shown how versatile the platform is and how there s a lot of stuff that we re just beginning to figure out in terms of operational things. When the Independence went to RIMPAC, I visited, I went out, on Independence for a day. And they were doing Special Forces off the Independence using both [ribs] and helicopters. And one of the amazing sights was to see two 60 helicopters on the flight deck, both turning at once. There s no other surface combatant in the Navy that can do that. They acted as the aggressor ship against four other ships for several hours and they couldn t find them, the other ships couldn t find them for a good while. The fact that we told Independence, get underway for RIMPAC with the surface module when they were doing the counter-mine module testing in San Diego, and they changed it out in 96 hours and headed out, showed the proof of that concept. Sending Freedom to Singapore showed that you can bring the crews in without -- That you can leave the ship where it is and rotate the crews in this crew rotation. That showed that that works with no drop off in terms of capability or skill level when you make that crew swap. We just had, Independence did their in-serve, which is the Navy inspection, and it got a superior performance, one of the highest you can get coming out of that. So some of those things I think show the utility, show the value, show the potential also of LCS going forward. DWG: Just a couple of quick ones. One is on the Navy s [COD] mission and I know the Navy s looking at various options for that. One, of course, being the V-22. So I m just wondering within your department is the Marine Corps making a hard push on the V-22 [inaudible] for that mission? And a second question, can you talk about the F-35 sea trials coming up? Secretary Mabus: The answer to the first one is sure, the Marines are pushing for the V-22. [Laughter]. DWG: What do you think of that? And will there be a budget decision in -- 17

18 Secretary Mabus: [Laughter]. I think there should be a decision on that by then, by 16. And I don t think I should tip my hand on that one. Having ridden in both platforms many times. If I can talk about both versions, because we re buying two versions, the B and the C. The B is the first one that we re getting because it s the Marines, they didn t buy the latest generation Hornets because they were waiting for the STOVAL version. And they re right on track. They ve stood up their first squadron in Yuma. They re on track to have their first operational squadron next year on their time schedule. The C, we are likewise, because that was going to be the last plane delivered. The B was first, the A was next, and then the C. The sea trials, those trials are where they need to be in terms of timing to support an IOC in the 2018, 2019 time frame. DWG: Mr. Secretary, can you say which carrier will be replacing the Bush and when that will happen? Secretary Mabus: The Vinson. DWG: Also, when will the Bataan be replaced with the next ARG? Secretary Mabus: Soon. The Bataan will be coming home -- Voice: [Inaudible]. Secretary Mabus: Iwo Jima is the replacement. It will be, the turnover is I think November. DWG: And when will the Vinson go into the Gulf to replace the Bush? Secretary Mabus: They re almost there now. It will be in the -- DWG: The next few weeks probably? Secretary Mabus: Shorter than that. Moderator: Secretary Mabus, that was 16 questions which might be a record, but I do have to note that you had an extra five minutes that was [inaudible] in a sense. [Laughter]. Thank you for coming in. Secretary Mabus: Thank you all. # # # # 18

19 Transcribed by: Professional Word Processing & Transcribing (801)