Thank you all here for braving the elements, and thanks to the sponsors that make this event possible. From our perspective,we use these events to align ourselves within the Submarine Force. We focus on our message. We work with you on the message. We try to give you insight into where we’re going. And somewhere inside there, we get a lot of credit for our effectiveness in guiding the Congress to the right answer in order to preserve our undersea dominance.
I want you to know that we know that we really don’t do that. We do that by arming you here,with the facts, and you do that in places and in ways that we can’t. It’s a very good coordinated team, we appreciate the extent to which you help us achieve that vision. So, let’s press on. And in light with something Admiral Richardson said last night,if you like what we’re saying, that’s fantastic. If you don’t, if you think it’s wrong, please challenge us, because what we’re saying,we think is right, and we’re happy to explain why, and we’re also happy to learn.
So just for starters,how’s everybody doing out there? We’re doing pretty well. I can see some faces in this audience that were the sort of the heroes that,as SSN commanders in the‘70s and the ‘80s and the ‘90s were the guys that we all wanted to grow up to be, because they had more time on this target, or more time on that location, with sensors up, doing things, and that we just thought that we’d never get a chance to do. And, frankly there were some years that we didn’t do so much of that.
But what I’m telling you is we’re growing a new generation of young guys like that who have major accomplishments under their belt, before the age of 40. With the things they have done, with the things they’ve been able to do with the ships and systems you’ve delivered and a pretty good level of confidence, a good level of risk-taking judgment. They know when to go for it, and they know when to say, “This is not the day.”
The things that they’re doing, range from long one-submarine-versus-one-submarine operations to learning a lot about how terrorist networks operate. You might be surprised to know Admiral Konetzni said we should be bragging more. This is not something we brag about.
But more often than not, when one of the more dominant terrorist leaders in the world departs the planet to whatever awaits him, I get a thank you note, because that’s a find fix and finish-is what they call the process. And more often than not, the finding and the fixing is done by people in the Submarine Force. Not intuitively obvious to all, probably very intuitively obvious to others who know some of the stuff that we do. The things that we do are getting recognition. We have a very good program to keep the Congress clued in on some of the recent accomplishments.
The President knows what we do, because many of the things that we do require his personal permission to do them. And so we’re very much on his mind. And then we get to show him the results. I have a regular battle rhythm with General Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. And he is a huge fan of our SSGN Program. To the point that he has funded a lot of the stuff we have in our Battle Watch Center with his money, because he likes the results, and the people he talks to everyday, they talk about how nice it is. It’s not just the big landing platform on the SSGN, it’s all the communications and planning space and that sort of thing that you have there as well. Overall pretty good. And, not to be complacent, I wrote an article for Proceedings last month, and the gist of it was, only the paranoid survive. And we have a lot to be paranoid about.
But these aren’t the ones to be paranoid about. These are our sailors. And I want to talk about them for a minute. I just came back from the Naval Academy last week where we recruited 138 new midshipmen into nuke subs. That’s the highest number in over a decade. And 17 of them were women. That was kind of interesting. One of the women, she couldn’t eat dinner with us at the celebration, because she had to weigh in at midnight for her boxing match the next weekend. And so that just shows you times change. And we had, at the other end of the spectrum, two midshipmen, great guys who were on the croquet team, and had a big match with St. Johns coming up. So there’s the other end of the spectrum.
Talented sailors nonetheless. We ran these folks pretty hard in 2014. We’re trying to back off just a notch in 2015. In 2014, I’d say we had probably four ships that were extended a month, at least, beyond their scheduled six-month deployment. Then we had two ships that completed a six-month deployment. In one case, after four weeks home, they went back out for another three months. Another one was home for two and went back for another three months. That was sort of urgent operational need, and the Navy has shifted to60/40 balance in the Pacific and it’s just the world hasn’t gotten the memo;and there’s a lot of stuff happening in other places.
We surged some folks. And amazing to me that the ships that we ran the hardest, have incredibly high morale. They knew why they were going. They knew why it was important. And they were willing to step up. And so were their families.Despite all the vacation plans and so forth, they got adjusted.
So there’s a message in there, to the troops, that’s important to tell to the troops, it’s important to tell the people who pay for what we do,and to the leaders of the country, and that the work that we do, is very important. The people who do it know it’s important. We need to treat the people who do it as if they are important. And we needed to probably share the results, when we can, with the folks, that pay for it.
I guess I didn’t mention the 4,000th SSBN patrol, really the rise in the prominence of the Strategic Deterrent Mission. This whole outside look at Strategic Deterrence, which started off with a look at the missile fields out in the central part of the country, with some of the Air Force issues there. It was a good thing, in the long run. It was good for them and it was good for us. And it really has got a lot of senior leadership to recognize that strategic mission underpins everything else that the Department of Defense does. And if we’re not credible in that area, we won’t be credible in any area.
I’d say the only person that has done more for the recognition of the importance of having a viable Strategic Nuclear Deterrent is Vladimir Putin. And he has with both his investment scheme and his loose talk -about “Don’t forget, we have nuclear weapons.” when he’s trying to intimidate one of his neighbors. That makes people realize—in a way that they maybe haven’t realized for a few years—that this is serious business. It does matter if we can do it properly. It does matter if your ships can get underway when they’re supposed to for as long as they’re supposed to.
Some of the challenges. These are exactly the same words I put before you last year where I talked about aging platforms and weapons and advancing foreign technologies. Let’s get to aging plat forms and weapons. The good news is that we are building two Virgini as per year. The bad news is that we’re decommissioning three Los Angeles class per year. So it’s getting tougher.
On the SSBN side,I mentioned that we’re limited by shipyard capacity, and we still are. However, since we’ve recognized that we are limited by shipyard capacity, and we’ve reinvigorated our priority of the strategic mission, a few good things have come out of that. The ships that are in overhaul, the SSBNs in overhaul, unlike last year, they’re actually getting a lot of attention in the priority scheme within the Naval shipyards. And so these ships which have been running, on average, six months behind for their 27-month overhauls, the bleeding has stopped. They really can’t recover time, but there’s been no slippage on an SSBN in the last six months or so, so that’s good thing.
We’ve done that by prioritizing the SSBNs,somewhat by de-emphasizing the SSNs. That was part of the cost. And as we go forward, one of the things that comes out of that is that we’re outsourcing to the private sector,three SSN availabilities. Which I think is good for a lot of reasons. Number one, it brings the shipyard workload back down within their capacity, that’s good. And then I think as we look at the degree that we need to ramp up skills in the shipyards,I think we can make these things come together. We can keep skilled workers on the books, maybe hire some skilled workers as we come up in what’s going to be a heavy workload for our two major shipyards;building ORP, building Virginia payload module and so forth. So I think that we can make that all work out. I won’t be the guy to make it work. It’ll be these guys in the front row for the most part. That’s the plan, and I think this is an everybody-winsscenario.
Let’s look at the right-hand column of ships, where we have the Severodvinsk and the Jin. You know I told you last year these things are coming out and we just don’t know much about them except they’re supposed to be really good. I can say actually we know a lot more about them this year than we knew last year,so that’s good. So the people that are developing the tactics,techniques, and procedures, know which of our systems,work well against them and that sort of thing and where we’re challenged. We know a lot more.
And again, the best I can do is talk about this, this isn’t me, this is guys who are 40 years old and younger, who are making very, very good tactical decisions about, “Is this the day that we think we can learn some more about this, or is this not the day?” And you would be proud of the way they worked through those decisions, and then the way that they execute once they make those decisions, and the way that they adapt,if reality doesn’t match the plan when they’re in execution. I just couldn’t be prouder of these folks. They’re doing just amazing work.
The fact remains we have capable adversaries who are operating over a wider and wider area,and this is gaining recognition far beyond just the Submarine Force. We have a daily conference with the commander on the state of deployed submarines around the world. And we talk to, on a daily basis, EuCom, StratCom, NorthCom, it’s part of the daily rhythm.
Take that Severodvinsk for example. The belief there is that ship was developed to be a multi-purpose ship, that on the one hand would come down looking for our SSBNs to neutralize them, but more importantly, it’s a nuclear cruise missile equipped submarine,that will probably be assigned to keep our national capital region at risk, in a world where the Russians believe that we are probably much better at missile defense as a country than we are. They believe that they need something that will go around a missile defense system. And this is it. So as their deployments become more frequent,we’re going to be very busy, and I’m going to be asking to renegotiate that 60/40 split because we only have so many subs.
We’re actually doing quite well against what’s out there,around the world, RADM Sawyer will talk to you some more. We’re not so naïve to think that we don’t have a lot of tough challenges coming up that we have to work on. Okay,next slide.
A lot of you have seen this. But some learn by repetition. So I’m going to go through where it is we’re going and once again, I’ll ask you to see yourself, where you fit in this picture, where your company fits in this picture. I’ve been happy with the way this has gone so far, because a lot of companies have come and told me how they fit in this picture in ways that I could not have imagined. I’m going to tell you what we’re trying to do. I’m going to tell you some things that we are doing. And then I will leave it to you to come back and tell us some things that we could do if only we knew what you know about your technology or capability.
But it’s basically the six lines of effort. It starts first with owning the best platforms. And then, we get into this thing we call grow longer arms. And I’ll explain these. Next, is beat the adversary’s system. And then, protect our strategic assets, get on the same page, and then written through it all, get faster, as in get faster than the Joint Services Imagery Digitizing System [J-SIDs] acquisition process. I’ll talk about these in a little bit of detail.
First and foremost, with owning the best platforms, we have to have a capable, quiet, Ohio Class submarine. And we’re working to build that. We know what the requirements are. The technology development is coming along. It’s funded pretty well. We can afford no gaps due to sequestration or other. And if we get the money, we get the right people working it, we’ll have a successful program that will deliver on time starting in ‘20-’21.
And if we start building in ’20-’21,we can make the aging Trident fleet hold on just about long enough to have a graceful overlap. On the two per year Virginia, we’ve got to keep doing that. Our demands are only increasing for the employment of the force. Even at two per year, we’re going to go below the Magic 48. And we’re going to have to be really careful figuring out where we send ships on deployment. If there is an opportunity to build more than two per year, or to keep building two per year when we build an Ohio Replacement, or to build perhaps three per year on years that we don’t build an Ohio Replacement, those should all be considered very, very seriously, because that will help us keep up with the demand, which is huge.
My aviation and surface brothers come to me from time to time, as they do their version of how they fight. And increasingly they tell us that we can’t win without you winning first. We have to be up front. We have to take out the enemy. We have to degrade the capability of the enemy at shore and at sea, in order for these folks who bring these higher volume firepower assets in, or the people who can hold territory and all that. If we’re not there first to make things happen, then it’s going to be a bad day.
We need Virginia, and we need it with the payload volume. We measure payload volume in units as Tomahawk capacity, which does not mean that we’re limited to only thinking that they’ll hold Tomahawks. The reason we do that is a little bit ofa strategic communications issue. We want to get the payload volume. There’s a few antibodies in Washington D.C. about what some of our potential payloads might be. Conventional Prompt Global Strike is the one that seems to upset people the most.
We’ve strategically chosen not to talk about all the things that might go in those tubes while we’re building them, because that Will help us get the tubes. It might be counterintuitive, but that’s the world we live in. That’s why we’re doing it that way.
And then of course, acoustics superiority. There’s been a lot of breakthroughs in that area thanks to the science generated by folks in this room. We think we can get a few more DB out of Virginia is what we’re saying, and that’ show we will continue to be superior. I can’t emphasize enough that everything else that I’m going to talk about, in capabilities, is built on this foundation that the adversary never really knows if he will have the ability to detect one of our submarines. Even when he has the submarine on his sensor, he doesn’t know what it is because their experience working against us is so little.
What we want the end result of all this to be is that we have actual, credible capability. When the adversary looks at his worst case scenario, based on where we might be—because he doesn’t know where we are—that picture looks pretty bad for him. And once we have them rocked back defensively and on their heels, then there’s a lot of stuff we can do to mess with them even more, some of which I’ll talk about.
But it all starts with—and you’ve all seen it—with the opera-tor on a surface ship or on the airplane, looking around and saying, “I don’t see anything.” And then having something coming out of the water, or something explode,and he didn’t see anything. And that’s right where we want to be.
I don’t usually show graphs, and I didn’t show this to my fellow briefers, but I just got my Proceedings in the mail yesterday, and I thought this graph was worth sharing with the crowd, because what it shows is the Navy budget as a percentage of the D.O.D. budget. But what it shows since 1950, is the SSBN funding per year, corrected for 2014 dollars.
The nice part about it is that it wasn’t created by Joe Tofalo, Joe Mulloy, or Rick Breckenridge. It was created by a woman named Melissa King, and published in an article by Dr. Eric Labs from Congressional Budget Office. So maybe it did come from Joe, but it’s tagged to Dr. Eric Labs from Congressional Budget Office—and that’s important because now we can quote this source. The message it shows is this is what you pull out when people say, “Well, geez, I don’t know if we can afford to recapitalize a strategic deterrent.” Well, of course we can, because we’re not spending—despite all the growth in GDP and all that—we’re not spending any more now than we were before to develop the capability, this worldwide capability that we didn’t even have before. It’s just not that we’re doing it with 41 submarines with short-range missiles, we’re doing it with 12 long-range submarines that are alert from the time they leave their home port. And it’s a much more efficient and effective system, and we have nothing to apologize for on the cost. And I think this is what Admiral Richardson was getting at last night, we have the right ship, the amount of money is when we build the ship, that is 1% of the defense budget for the year that we built it, as we do this project that comes around once every 40 years. So don’t apologize, just explain. That’ should be our message.
So this is the theory now how it’s built on top of having the best platforms, and that is to make those platforms more effective across a wider area and to keep your enemy on the extreme defense against submarines through a package of capabilities that we refer to as grow longer arms. So let’s start with underwater, where you can see where there’s a lead bullet where there’s a short-range torpedo, that’s basically the torpedo that we have today.
And then we want to, in the fairly near term, extend the range of that torpedo. The ability to effectively target that torpedo over the horizon using basically simple, cheap unmanned, air vehicles, we can make sure we’re hitting the right target, and we can make adjustments for a guy who’s maneuvering while he’s over the horizon.
That’ll bring us out to the sort of the 30-40 mile range. And then this thing we called a gold bullet is getting into the 100 mile+ torpedo. Easily doable from a propulsion plant capability. And then when we match it with some autonomy that exists today whether it be in the academic world, or oil and gas world, and then even give it some communications. We can reliably take a torpedo and hit a target over 100 miles away.
We’ll probably start with stationary targets. In other words, we’ll take Harbor X and Pier 2, and we know what ties up there. In fact, go back to the graphic Challenges to Maintaining Superiority.It might be hard to see. Just in that lower picture, just above the rudder of that ship, there’s a tunnel. That tunnel holds up to six SSBNs. So that’s my poster child. I would like to drive a torpedo into that tunnel from 100 miles away. And then I’d like to make the people who own that tunnel have to defend against that type of capability.
Then when you can do something like that, this whole idea of, “Oh we’ll go in the tunnel. They’ll think we’re all at sea, and they’ll run themselves ragged trying to find us.” Maybe not, maybe you don’t want to be in that tunnel. So just things like that. There’s a million equivalents to that. There are other tunnels in other countries, and we should give them that quandary. That’s where I’m going.
Let’s talk about in the air. We very much want to get back into the anti-ship missile business.We have a great Tomahawk missile right now, with a range of about 1,000 miles. We once had a TASM, a Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile that had a range of 350 miles. And frankly,when we had the TASM, we knew we could hit something with it. We knew it would hit something. We just really weren’t confident what it would hit.
Command and Control has come a long way since then. Whether it be our ability to get smaller areas of uncertainty with off-board sensors. Whether it’s the ability to put the missile’s equivalent of facial recognition software in a seeker. And what we need to get to this future point is we need to take something like the Tomahawk that we had today, we need to be able to give it an anti-ship mode.That way, you can start drawing this thousand mile circle around where any U.S. submarine might be. And if you’re our adversary, then you have a need to maintain an air defense posture and be on a very short tether to react to something that might come over the horizon, and within three or four seconds after you first see it, it could hit you.
That would put your enemy in a defensive crouch, and it also allows you—because of the systems of systems he has to maintain —that allows you to do a lot in the deception in the cyber world. If only you can get him to start off by being very, very paranoid. And this is an area where we just help the overall joint effort just immensely. But we’ve got to be able to produce this incredible threat. Well within our technical means,as the offensive ASUW Program develops, we need to be a part of that. And if we’re not written into that, in a way that looks like this, I’ll be fighting whatever the plan is, tooth and nail.
I think some of you know that already, we’ll be dabbling in the anti-air business as well. That’s about all I can say, but it’s pretty neat.
We call the next line of effort Beat the Adversary’s System.And the basic guidance here is that A2AD,which is currently at the surface and above, is going underwater. Incredible evidence, people who worry about us are trying to build things that can keep us out. And we should be okay with that. Okay, it’s a little counterintuitive. But we should be okay with that, provided that in a fast enough timeline, we can produce the set of capabilities that makes those systems obsolete at IOC. And what I mean by that is, if it’s an acoustic system, then we need to have the right package of acoustic decoys that can be deployed at a time or place of our choosing, so we can probe what their actual capabilities are, so we can make them see things that look like our submarines—maybe see things that look like their submarines—in a very coordinated way.
We can do that. This is engineering, this is not science. And then ditto for making them see periscopes on their radars. I think you’ve all heard my radar decoy story too many times. Bottom line is we can give a credible representation of a U.S. submarine periscope in a device that we can shoot out of a 3-inch launcher, and cost less than $3,000. And there will be days when we choose to pepper the ocean with those things, and watch people waste their weapons.
Protect Our Strategic Assets
We’re looking at building systems of unmanned systems that can provide us with near perfect undersea awareness over small areas. We have a big project spinning up right now. It’s basically a technology reliability level, probably a six to seven somewhere in there, but with a little cover from CNO Greenert. We’re going to make a big, bold move in the next year. And, we’re going to only advance the state of unmanned by doing something that needs to be done in the real world. That’s about the best I can tell you there.
I’ve been complaining a lot about how we don’t have a system that will allow us to integrate all of the information at all the different classification levels,whether it’s special access this or that,whether it came from a ship or a destroyer or whatever. Or, even IUSS systems on the bottom. Well, it turns out—and I visited our good friends up at Penn State—the system that I was dreaming of already exists. It’s just being used somewhere else for a different purpose. And again, they rolled this out for me because they were wondering why I wanted something that is already exists.
But this is a case where we educate each other. So now my job is, how do I take something that was made for one customer in a different area, and get this thing quickly rolled out, so we can quickly get submarines and strike groups and people in the fleet command centers having a good, reliable, agile system that can incorporate all levels of info. More to follow on that.
This is a graphic which, I wish was in all your offices, or something like this, behind your chair,on your desk, because this is a money slide. This shows how this diverse group of people here can work with each other to improve our overall capability. Just looking at that graph on the outer part of that circle, we have the platforms,the foundation of what we do. And these are things that we build on the order of decades. And once in a while, while we’re building them, we get a chance to make some improvements, like VPM or acoustics superiority, or something like that. But we’re basically talking decades. It has to be done right. It has to last a long time.
And then as you move into the next area, these tend to be vehicles. And these are things that we can take a little more risk on. We don’t have to do as detailed testing. We can probably build them in a small number of years—single digit years from when we decide to do it, until we do it. And when we do, we can create this quickly changing face to our adversaries. And that’s important.
And then inside that,there are packages and payloads that might ride on the ship, the platform, or they may ride on the vehicle. And some of that stuff, we can turn around in literally months. In fact, we do that for special missions right now. Someone has a new thing we want to look at. We design the right package. It goes on a ship. And we go exploit something somewhere in the world. We know how to do that.
But I won’t name company names, because I’d probably beviolating some rule, but really in the last week, I learned about a scenario with a shipbuilder. One of our shipbuilders bought a company that makes a vehicle. And they kind of figured out together that, “You guys have this neat vehicle. We’re pretty good at manufacturing.” They went out and found another company that was probably the state-of-the-art in unmanned vehicle batteries. So they brought them in.
I got really excited about it. I came here last night, and I went and grabbed a bunch of guys that specialize in payloads. And I said, “Hey, you got to meet these guys. You’re the payload guys. These guys are really moving on the vehicle.” And someone said, “Met them last week.” This is the type of energy that we need to move quickly enough, that we can turn that technology cycle, in a way that is faster than our normal development process, and more importantly, faster than our adversaries. Because our adversaries don’t have our normal development process, and our adversaries have plenty of money.
But we have more innovative, creative people, and your duty is to work together to build stuff, and then our duty is to buy good stuff when you build it. And I recognize our track record always hasn’t always been that good in that area, but we’re working on it. Lastly, I just want to do a quick cycle around the pictures to show that we are doing some real stuff.
But we have more innovative, creative people, and your duty is to work together to build stuff, and then our duty is to buy good stuff when you build it. And I recognize our track record always hasn’t always been that good in that area, but we’re working on it. Lastly, I just want to do a quick cycle around the pictures to show that we are doing some real stuff.
So in the lower-right, you’ll see a couple of vehicles, sticking out of a dryock shelter. What’s important about that isthat we’re doing an unmanned vehicle mission this year. We’re doing it with a brand new ship, who is going to do it in a real deployment. That’s a real deployment before she goes to PSA, which is another big coup for the system. And now we don’t have all the handling stuff built, so we’re going to throw those things out and retrieve them with the most agile, ocean interface that we have, which is acouple of Navy SEALs. Andthey’ll push them out and get them back.
And then moving on, above that, there’san unmanned surface vehicle. It’s a wave glider, which we’re going to use as part of that system of systems I was talking about. It’s a vehicle that can stay at sea fora year plus. It makes its own power. It maintains station by harnessing wave action. And it communicates with things below the water and with satellites. And it’s pretty huge.
That air vehicle that you see there on the bottom, that’s some-thing that we’re upgrading to get a 9-hour time of flight launched outof submarine torpedo tube. Huge demand for that from our special operations brothers. So we can help them get some better insight as they go ashore. And then, left of that, there is adevice for launching acoustic decoys out of unmanned vehicles,which again, will help us in that beat the system of systems area. That’s developed up at NUWC.
Moving left, you see the work on modular torpedo compo-nents. NUWCis working on Comms and Navigation components. They’re working on an extended range torpedo run. And they’re running neck and neck with some folks fromPenn State that have come up with a very elegant way as we get back into heavyweight torpedo production to show us how we couldgo muchfurther, faster, than the current plan. The current plan is a sort of a wedge to get the money in the budget. That’s done. But we all know that we could do better. And they’re coming to uswith some good ideas. So we’ll see where those go.
And then of course, up at the top, we’ve got, again, the two great platforms that we have right now—one we have, one we’re building. And so we think we’re in a pretty good spot. We’re not overly optimistic, but we’re out there doing pretty well. I’d say, very well. But the Navy and the Joint Forces, are counting on us to do even more going forward.
