Question and Answer Session
If we were looking for reasons we could have not been here today we have them—but this was something I really wanted to do. First, I want thank Admiral Tom Marfiak for the kind of support and the partnership we have had with the Naval Institute this past year. Second, I want to, in a very public way, express my appreciation to the Naval Institute for the manner in which its staff members have helped us publish and communicate our vision for the future, our vision for the U.S. Navy in the 21st century—"Sea Power 21." I believe the Naval Institute has done a fantastic job.
When we decided to publish "Sea Power 21," we were convinced that we needed to have a succession of discussions about this vision. We approached the Naval Institute to work with us on this and they agreed to do so. We are grateful for the partnership. I will tell you that the Naval Institute's staff has suffered with us in working with tight time lines and pushing publication dates. I hope it worked well for the Naval Institute; it certainly worked for us, and we appreciate it greatly.
I am told that I am to speak 20 minutes and then we are going to have questions and answers. Those of you who do know me know that me speaking 20 minutes is very difficult; because I can hardly even say hello in ten. So in 20 minutes I might not get as much done as I should. But I am a long-standing member of the Naval Institute—I think since '76 is what it says on my little card. I was telling Tom how much I appreciate the fact that the Naval Institute has gone digital and the way things are working on the Internet. It makes it easier for us. We are encouraged by what we see going on, and I wanted to say that to the membership, too.
It is an exciting time to be in the U.S. Navy. And there is a couple here who are very important to me, and I wanted to introduce them to you. I wanted to do this under the context that you never know what influence you are having on people. It is one of the interesting things about leadership, isn't it? All of us have a leadership role to play in some form. There is a couple sitting over here, at this table, the Holmbergs. Would you two stand? These are my sea parents. I wanted to introduce them to you: Lee and Len Holmberg. Len Holmberg was my commanding officer when I was a lieutenant (junior grade) chief engineer on the USS Gearing (DD-710).
Many do not know that I had broken service. I came in to the Navy as a reserve, and I got out of the Navy after my initial obligation. When I got out, Len Holmberg was back in Washington, D.C., and he started, once a week, going over to the Bureau of Personnel and harassing them that they should contact me. He worked it hard, and the rest is history. I am in the Navy today because of Len Holmberg. When we came back in the Navy, Connie and I came to Washington. We wanted to come to the Pentagon and figure out how this thing worked. Lee got us a place to live. They have just taken care of us like parents would.
I want to share briefly with you where we are today and what is going on. I have 54% of our Navy forward deployed this morning. Every morning when I come in there is a piece of paper that tells the number. I have 303 ships in the active Navy today; 163 of them are forward deployed. They are ready. They have been performing brilliantly. I will not spend time talking about that. I would like to talk about "Sea Power 21" and what it means. Then I look forward to a discourse with you.
I was thinking about what is going on out there. Our Navy is incredibly ready. The day that operations commenced, I wrote a note to the Secretary of Defense. In it I told him the U.S. Navy is ready to commence operations. Then I said I have never seen this Navy, in my entire career, as ready as it is today. I want to report to you that that is the case. This is the case for a lot of reasons. First, we have absolutely incredible people. I am so proud of the way they are conducting themselves and the way they are performing on the point. We set out early on in something we called "The Battle for People," to win the battle for people. I am a great believer that we must understand how to compete in the marketplace, because we are competing in a marketplace for human resources.
To make a long story short, we are in the third year of the most incredible retention that we have ever had in the history of our Navy. The goal for this year for first-term reenlistment is 56%. The last two years we have broken each previous year's record as the best year ever. So we cut 3,000 out of the recruiting numbers last month. When I became chief of naval operations (CNO), I believe the number we were recruiting was 56,000 or 57,000 a year. This year we are down to 41,000 and the number will get smaller. It is an exciting thing. One of the reasons our readiness is so good is because, for the first time since I have been in the Navy, we have the right number of people. We are training the right people at the right time in the cycle, and it is all working.
"If you are not growing, you are dead."
If you talk about Sea Strike, projecting offense, you must talk about the U.S. Marine Corps, our number-one joint partner. None of the services can do this by ourselves. We are absolutely committed to jointness. If it does not jump off the pages as you read the articles and we define what it is, I need to reemphasize, first and foremost, that it must be about jointness. Sixty-five-plus percent of the Marine Corps' combat capability is over there, deployed. The Marines are part of our projecting offense team.
Let us talk about what the future is about. The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) will give us more combat reach than F/A-18E/F. Our objective is to get out of the business where we are providing for our own defense. Our objective is not to tie up the resources on our flight deck with sorties that have to provide for our own defense. We want to turn all of that into combat offensive striking power.
Frankly, there has been a revolution going on quietly. When you can shoot down missiles in the exo-atmosphere, you do not have to hang airplanes on the blades for hours on end out there in combat air patrol stations. The future is about JSF with incredible reach, and unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs). Just on 23 February, the first UCAV flew. This year's budget, which we pushed through Congress, has a major commitment to the development of that kind of capability. It is exciting. The Tomahawks of the future will go hundreds and thousands of miles and will loiter on station. With all of these advantages, you can deal with real-time, developing situations.
Sea Shield is about projecting defense. When I came in the Navy and served on Captain Holmberg's ship, we talked about war at sea. We defended ourselves at sea. Tomorrow's Navy is about projecting not just offense, but projecting defense hundreds and even thousands of miles away. Now, do I see that clearly today? Well, I see some of it. When I gave the assignment to individuals to write the chapters on "Sea Power 21," I told them this: Do not even think about being restricted in your dreaming about the future by what is in the budget today. Do not do that. Quite the contrary. If we are going to have a vision for the future, we have to be free to dream a little bit about the future. So if somebody is going to be critical of an approach and say, "Wait a minute, that is not reflected in the budget; not what you wrote on your chapter on Sea Shield," that means you reached far enough to at least stimulate the kind of thinking that is possible.
What is it going to be like in the future for us to be able to not just project offense, but to project defense? The last 15 months have been the most successful in our history in this area. We have had an incredible year in the missile defense arena. Six tests, 100% successful. Six tracking, six firing exercises that have accelerated this to the point that the President, a few months ago, said we will field, in the year 2004, an initial sea-based missile defense capability. We are on track and we are going to make it happen.
Let us talk about Sea Basing. You had the Commandant of the Marine Corps in here last night. Sea Basing is about projecting sovereignty, if you will. It is about the operational independence that comes from—remember my little 30-second blurb—the far corners of the earth, without a permission slip. It is about operating from the maritime domain. If you look at the challenges that we faced in getting force structure to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and look at the situation when we were operating in Afghanistan, one of the reasons we were required to provide this persistent air combat capability was because of the difficulty of getting to the scene of action. It is my conviction that the future is going to be more like that, not less like that.
To make a long story short, here is what I think about the way we need to think about Sea Basing. By the way, if you talk to the Commandant, his focus will be on what he needs for the U.S. Marine Corps. That is perfect, because the Marines are our number-one joint partner. But I want the expanse of our vision to be as wide as we can figure out how to make it, with this thought in mind: That if at the core of our being is the ability to operate from the maritime domain, with operational independence in the sense of freedom, then we must have the courage to examine every assumption we have ever made about the way we put our force together, and exploit to the fullest the ability to operate from the maritime domain without limitations that tie us back to the shore side of things.
Now you let your imagination run with that as far as you can figure out how to let it run. It absolutely means a maritime positioning future. That is the Marine Corps program. Two years ago, I was thinking that belonged to the Marines. It turns out it is in my budget. I started thinking about how could we exploit some of that capability for us, in partnership with the Marine Corps. How do we do that? I am convinced that instead of having a floating warehouse that you unload and then it is an empty warehouse, there have to be really unique and powerful things that you can then do with the potential that exists in the maritime domain to help us with command-and-control problems and other kinds of challenges we are going to face. It is about the ability to project our sovereignty wherever we need to be able to project it, ultimately for this purpose: to give the President of the United States of America options.
"Numbers are not nearly as important as capabilities."
Question: First of all, let me preface my question by noting that I guess I am the token Air Force officer in the audience. Like a number of my classmates, when I graduated I went in the Air Force. I was very interested to hear you say that you are going to reduce the complement of aircraft on carriers devoted to the defense of the carriers. As you undoubtedly know, one of the knocks the Air Force has with carriers, which is held by civilian analysts, too, is the fact that such a large a percentage of the offensive force is actually dedicated to protecting the carrier. What you are doing makes a lot of sense, particularly if you are going to go to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of some sort for air defense. Does it make sense, perhaps, to re-core the nuclear-powered cruisers, put your UAVs on them, and have them go with the carriers and maintain that defensive cover over the carriers?
Admiral Clark: The question really is, Do we need nuclear cruisers to stay with nuclear carriers? And we have found that we do not need that. We can do this with the structure that we have today. But I will tell you that I did not talk about CG(X). CG(X) is another program that is undefined yet, but there will be a requirement for us to create a new class of ships, and it will follow on the DD(X), which is transformational with new technology. It is the biggest change we have ever seen in naval platforms. It is all electric, with the ability to fire a gun at 100 miles, and the first round will hit something the size of one of these tables—from 100 miles. And when the rail gun comes, the range will be farther than that. An all-electric platform will open up potentials and possibilities that exist with high-energy weapons. We have worked through this and the conventional cruisers are going to be able to do this just fine. One of the reasons is because the influence, in terms of range and space, is changing dramatically. When I worked for Captain Holmberg (as a lieutenant [junior grade]), our combat reach was about 8 or 9 miles. You know, we were truly awesome. [Laughter] But the future is about thousands of miles, and that is why this vision is about a truly distributed force with a structure that is unlike what we even think about today. But it is going to happen.
Question: I had the honor of serving over in Afghanistan with the people that were up in the plane eight hours at a shot. I am with Hawkeye Advanced Development down at Naval Air Systems Command.
Admiral Clark: That was our number one priority last year. Did you know that?
Question: Yes, sir. I was going to thank you for that. Sir, what we saw in Afghanistan was very interesting with respect to command and control. As we went in, we were briefing to go into Operation Southern Watch. We sat off the coast of Pakistan on the USS Vincennes (CG-49) and we briefed a very structured command and control system. What we experienced starting in the early weeks of October 2001 was something that proved to us that command and control deserves the spot that it has in our aircraft and the airborne warning and control system in a forward-pushed level. My concern is that with ForceNet, we push the command and control further and further up the chain. Where do you see command and control going once we start to enable it with ForceNet and some of the other information and data sharing tools that we are starting to see? My concern is that we may start dropping out on time-critical strike because we have to start running things further up the chain.
Admiral Clark: So the real question is will we be commanding these operations from the Pentagon, or something like that? Here is what I think. I think that technology allows us to gain more oversight, but I do not know anybody who is trying to pull it all in such that decisions are made in one place. You experienced some situations over there in time-critical targeting. By the way, in 80% of the targets struck in Afghanistan, the pilot did not know the target when they launched. Now that is a far cry from the way it used to be. And there are some advantages to this. It really cuts down on the brief. [Laughter] I think the world of tomorrow is about is real-time stuff. I think operators in the cockpit will be part of a distributed architecture the components of which are all making the decision together, and all apportioning resources.
"In 80% of the targets struck in Afghanistan, the pilot did not know the target when they launched."
Question: Good afternoon, sir. I want to assure you, you are preaching to the choir here when you talked about growth versus death. You talked about being direct and capabilities being more important than, let's say, raw numbers. Where I am going with this is that this forum, which I have been a member of for all of a day now, has provided a tremendous platform for the exchange of ideas that some people really loved and others really hated. This is the only place I have seen it. I am wondering what sort of persistence, from your end of it, we might expect in allowing or permitting, or indeed encouraging, the expression of such ideas, so that we actually go to the growth end, which is often a controversial and painful process, rather than death?
Admiral Clark: Thank you for the question. It really gets to the heart of how an institution establishes an environment where creativeness and initiative are cherished. Now, I have to tell you that one of my jobs is to find leaders who will take the Navy in the correct direction. So there is a place for bold, aggressive expression of thought, and there is a place to get aligned. I have spent a lot of time, since I found out I was going to get this job, trying to figure out that function as the CEO of $100-billion company. You need to get aligned. Remember my top-five priorities. Priority five was something called alignment. People did not know what that meant at first, but they do now. I had an Air Force person come up to one of my flag officers a few months ago and say, "I have never seen the Navy so together. Now you all are saying the same stuff." How nice that is. One of my jobs is to get the right people on the bus and get the right people off the bus, and sometimes that is difficult and challenging. But with the new fitness report and evaluation system that I described, I intend to create a system that allows me to put round pegs in round holes, and not try to jam everybody into a square hole.
When we disclosed "Sea Power 21," Vern Clark did not write all those chapters. I asked other people to. It was the time for other people to dream and express their thoughts. And we will continue to be in that mode. But when we define a program and we are going after that program and the best collective wisdom is to go this direction, then that is not the time to start having another big discussion so you prolong the debate and never get anyplace. That is the time to align and say speed counts, climb on board, and here we go. I do not discourage anybody from talking about the imperatives of a particular chapter of "Sea Power 21." You know, what can Sea Basing become? I encourage that. But I would discourage somebody questioning that we are going to be able to exploit the seas like that. We have decided we are going to figure out how to exploit the maritime domain. That is not an area where we are having free and open discussion; we are going there.
Now, it is free and open how were going to do that. Bring all the great ideas you've got. I have een doing this since 1968 and what I have found is that it is real easy to be against stuff. Something somebody else says, it is easy to be critical about that. It is a lot more difficult to be for something. So what I encourage people to do is bring their ideas. We want to hear them. Tell us what you are for. And I want leaders who know what they believe in and know what they will do with the authority we give to them.
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