Along with about 20,000 other folks, I was in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The next day, I was asked to do a job that nobody had ever done before: I became the Chief of Naval Operations’ unofficial Damage Control Assistant.
For the next six weeks I worked seven days a week, usually 10-12 hours a day, trying to lead recovery from the damage the attack inflicted on the Navy. I interfaced with many agencies—the FBI, which led the criminal investigation; the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which handled the office space reallocation and body recovery activity; and the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel, which led the effort to replace those on the Navy Staff who were killed and wounded. I also worked with the Pentagon Renovation (PenRen) staff, who were leading the effort to reconstruct the Pentagon building.
Almost immediately, PenRen’s leader, Lee Evey, announced the Pentagon would be rebuilt in a year. Since it had taken many years to merely renovate a fifth of the building, I’m not sure anyone believed this objective was achievable, but a year later the destroyed section of the building was indeed rebuilt. Getting that done required two things: an “all hands-on-deck” herculean effort, and a ruthless elimination of distraction and dilution. Real solutions were required, meaning the “good idea fairy” needed to die a quiet death.
The PenRen effort comes to mind when I run across articles about how to fix the problems in U.S. nuclear submarine construction. Some of these articles are good, but most of them miss the mark. Some proposals dance around the margins of the causes, while others address the wrong problems altogether. Many more are naïve, providing solutions that cannot be acted upon. And some proposals would actually make the problem worse.
Most dive headfirst into solutions without first identifying the reasons for today’s shortfalls in submarine construction. As a nuclear-trained officer, I learned that before trying to solve a problem, we must first drive analysis to root causes. And it doesn’t take a nuclear engineer to determine the primary root cause of problems in the current submarine force structure: a faulty crystal ball that was, intentionally or not, leveraged to elevate political advantage over national security.
How Problems in the Submarine Force Structure Came to Be
While many blame the global war on terror for our current degradation, the causes stretch back to the years before 9/11, when national leaders misread the evolving strategic situation after the Cold War.
Looking to invest a “peace dividend” that never really existed, the president decided the U.S. Navy could afford to substantially reduce our number of nuclear submarines. This led leaders to decommission many perfectly good American submarines (including mine) halfway through their useful lives, while purposely initiating the atrophy of the nuclear submarine construction industry. Hundreds of suppliers were lost, talent departed for greener pastures, and the industry was left without the ability to regenerate its diminished capacity.
A second root cause of our current crisis is that Navy leaders underestimated the time and training needed to rebuild workforce talent and requalify the supplier base.
As I learned when I made my transition from the Navy to industry, Navy personnel may monitor and oversee industry work in a Navy role such as Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Construction, and Repair (SupShips), but they don’t actually have any responsibility or experience building ships. Being present in a shipyard is not the same as being responsible for hiring, qualifying, scheduling, designing, building, and qualifying the supply chain, then managing the touch labor required to get the job done.
None of the senior Navy leaders, from the Secretary, to the Undersecretary, to the Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, or senior Naval Sea Systems Command (NavSea) commanders, have ever built a ship, so their ability to know what it would take to fix what ails submarine construction is limited.
The impact of this arrangement became clear to me during my post-Navy industry career when I had to fend off countless unworkable recommendations by Navy officials on how to address problems with some of my programs. Most of those recommendations would not work. Some were laughable, illuminating the degree to which officials did not understand the industries they oversaw.
Want to fix shipbuilding? Then put some actual shipbuilders in senior positions in the Department of the Navy and the Department of Defense.
There is precedent for this. Remember that William Knudson, a highly successful manufacturing expert at Ford and General Motors in the 1920s and 30s, was directly commissioned following his time as president of General Motors, to a rank of lieutenant general in the Army overseeing World War II defense production. His manufacturing expertise and force of will helped rapidly transition and expand the United States' civilian manufacturing capacity into the “arsenal of democracy” needed for victory over Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
Diesel-Electric Is Not the Answer
There are no easy fixes to the problem. Yet some commentators suggest we might improve the Navy’s submarine force structure by shifting to the construction of diesel-electric submarines. This would make things far worse.
First, diesel submarines do not fill any U.S. Navy mission gaps. The Navy needs submarines that can transit vast expanses of ocean quickly and conduct 21st-century intelligence-gathering missions. Diesel submarines lack both mobility and mission capability.
When given enough time, diesel boats can transport themselves to relevant mission areas, but once on station their mobility and endurance are severely limited by battery life. They can threaten ships that come close to them, but they cannot move fast enough, long enough to chase ships that do not close sufficiently for them to conduct an attack.
During World War II, U.S. submarines got around this problem by sprinting with engines on the surface, but that option is not available to submarines that want to remain undetected under the gaze of 21st century sensors. That’s why modern submariners tend to think of diesel boats as “smart mines”— they just cannot be very mobile while conducting operations in denied areas.
I saw this in spades while serving as a submarine commodore, when the Australian diesel boat HMAS Rankin was attached to my squadron during the 2004 Rim of the Pacific exercise. In actual practice, I could only assign a limited set of missions to that ship.
But of course that conversation only addresses wartime missions, which are not what submarines do day-to-day during peacetime. Those missions are highly classified but are routinely described as “highly critical to the defense of the United States,” as recently demonstrated when the USS Washington (SSN-787) was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for such a mission. They require submarines to spend weeks or months undetected in sensitive areas—not something a diesel submarine is normally capable of doing. This is why even Australia has come to realize the need for nuclear-powered boats, which is the genesis for the AUKUS Trilateral Security Partnership.
A kind assessment would be that commentators suggesting an infusion of diesel-electric submarines into the American fleet do not know what modern American submarines actually do.
Even if the mission profile of diesel boats were relevant, such a recommendation would require creating new infrastructure to field boats that do not meet any modern U.S. submarine requirements. The United States would not be able to task overworked nuclear shipyards with simultaneously building non-nuclear boats. Hence, after spending billions of dollars on new diesel boat designs and qualifying thousands of new suppliers, at least one new shipyard would have to be built to construct submarines we do not need. The environmental impact statements alone would take many years. Meanwhile, talent, suppliers, resources, and money would peel away from the most important job—building nuclear submarines.
Solve the Problem Now
The Navy suffers from “shiny object syndrome,” dabbling in technologies that may solve marginal problems in 20 years or so, while serious problems languish today.
Myriad small and medium sized companies that could lend their support to solve elemental “big Navy” problems are instead asked by the Navy to chase “technology of the moment” such as unmanned underwater vessels. Those activities divert engineering and production effort away from the most important task— building nuclear submarines. They fly in the face of the “all-hands-on-deck” approach required to solve this most serious problem.
No one should pretend there is no industry fault in all this. There is. But when operational failures occur, sailors die, so the government owns the totality of this problem. When a ship runs aground it is always a team problem, but the captain is the one who gets relieved. In this case the “captain” is on the government side.
Getting submarine construction back on track requires a back-to-basics approach that will ruthlessly eliminate any activity that does not help solve the crisis. That means canceling competing programs and stripping down others. It means finding qualified leaders, then giving them the authority to lead. It requires leaders like the aforementioned William Knudson, or a Leslie Groves, William Raborn, Elon Musk, or—dare I say it—another Hyman Rickover.
Admiral James Stockdale once mused about how he survived seven years as a prisoner of war, saying, “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
There can be no better advice, because we face some brutal facts indeed.
