Navy secretary: Green energy saves Marines’ lives

Washington Examiner: I wanted to start off talking with you about the number of ships in the fleet. You’ve made a real priority during your tenure to put ships under contract. You’ve said that you’re on track to hit the 308-ship Navy, but during the election, candidates have been criticizing the size of the Navy, saying it’s too small.

And during a markup in the House Armed Services Committee, they said they are on the path to a 350-ship Navy. So does the Navy need more than 308 ships, given world conditions today?

Mabus: Well, going back, it takes a long time to build a fleet, particularly if you’ve got one in decline. The numbers that I give: in 2001, 316 ships, by 2008, 278 ships. So when the Navy went way down was during that seven years. During that seven years, the Navy put 41 ships under contract. I’ve been here for seven years now. We have been 84 ships under contract and we’ve done so with a smaller top line.

So the force structure assessment that we have says that we need 308 ships to do all the missions that the Navy needs to do, and it balances it in terms of what types of ships. We’re doing another one today, this force structure assessment that was done before was done before a resurgent Russia, was done before China became much more active, before ISIL, so our [chief of naval operations], [Adm.] John Richardson, says that he would bet a paycheck that the number is going to be bigger when this new force structure assessment comes out.

I’m happy to bet one of his paychecks too that the number is going to be bigger. I think that as you look at the world, to your point, it’s getting more complicated. Our responsibilities are getting larger. The presence that Navy needs, if you’re not there when you need to be there, it’s going to be too late.

Having ships back in the U.S., having ships that aren’t in the right place, not just at the right time, but all the time, having that presence around the world for whatever comes over the horizon is going to be the thing that’s needed. And if you look at the world situation and you feed it into the force structure assessment, it’s almost certainly going to be higher than 308 ships.

We built to 308. This administration, we’ve got all the ships under contract that we’re going to have, because what you’re talking about is for next year, for the FY17 budget. Building a fleet is not the job of one administration, you’ve got to keep doing it. If you miss a year, if you miss a ship, you never make it up. You can’t make it up with money because, No. 1, you don’t have the capacity in the shipyards, No. 2, it just takes a long time to build one of these complex marvels that is a United States Navy warship.

“Our responsibilities are getting larger. The presence that Navy needs, if you’re not there when you need to be there, it’s going to be too late,” said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. (AP Photo)

Examiner: Given the large role that the size of the Navy has played in some of the GOP debates, are you confident that the next administration, regardless of party, will continue this push to keep growing and not let it decline again?

Mabus: I’m confident that the reasoning is there. I’m confident that the need for it is going to be there, and it’s going to be pretty clear. I’ve been very happy with the level of support that Congress has given us to build the fleet, to rebuild the fleet from where it had fallen. So I think that going forward, regardless of who [the next president] is, you’re going to have the intellectual underpinnings of why you need a Navy fleet of the size that we’re talking about. Whether it happens or not, I don’t know.

Examiner: You haven’t been shy about taking on some of the Republican candidates over their criticism of the fleet size, calling it counterproductive. With your comments, do you feel like you’ve changed anyone’s mind? Do you think that’s even possible?

Mabus: Well, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York, used to have a saying: “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinions. What you’re not entitled to are your own facts.” And that’s what I’ve been trying to do. Some people have said we’ve got the smallest fleet since World War I. No. 1, we’ve also got fewer telegraphs than in World War I. It’s not a comparison that has any meaning.

But No. 2, when they talk about the size of the fleet today, when anybody does, I don’t care if it’s a presidential candidate or anybody else. If you talk about the size of the fleet today, you’ve got to understand how we got there.

I mean, I think the phrase I used in front of Congress one time was that the bed was already on fire when I got in it. The fleet was in decline, and it was in decline during a great military build up in our history from 2001-08. We have reversed that. But we will get it to where we need to be by 2021, that’s how long it takes to turn this sort of stuff around.

Because it’s a net thing, you’re retiring ships all the time when they reach the end of their lifespan. If the next Congress, if the next administration, doesn’t keep us on that path to either that number or higher, we won’t stay there for very long at all. You see it sort of start tailing off, so that’s why I said it’s not the job of one administration.

We’ve got the path set, our shipyards are being very efficient, the price on every single type of naval ship has come down, most of the time dramatically. We’ve got the trained workforce that we need in those shipyards. The shipyards are buying things in economic order quantities so they can pass the savings through to the taxpayer, to us.

And we’ve just got to keep on that pace. We’ve got them in a good place. It’s going to be up to other folks if we stay there, but I’m confident that given the world as it is, or I’m hopeful given the world as it is, the role of the United States Navy, the fact that we are the first responders, the fact that we’re the cop on the beat, that we are out there all the time, is going to underscore and show that need for the size of the fleet.

Examiner: I have to ask you about the election. It’s been one of the wildest in years. Donald Trump’s national security team, once he came out with it, people have said that it’s had some obscure names and that even if he got the best people, some people have wondered if he would even listen to their advice. Are you concerned about what a Trump presidency would mean for national security?

Mabus: I’m a former elected official. I was a governor in Mississippi. One of the great things about this job, but also it’s a little bit frustrating from time to time, is I can’t get involved in politics. The military and the protection of this country should not be a political issue.

Candidates can talk about anything they want, but people who are running the military, whether the civilians or uniformed, we’ve got to steer clear of that or the whole civilian control of the military becomes in question.

Examiner: During your tenure as the longest serving Navy secretary in recent times, you’ve placed a real priority on clean energy and climate change. Are you at all worried that the next secretary won’t make this a priority and that, if it’s not a priority, some of the progress you’ve made could be lost?

Mabus: I think that now, it’s normal in the Navy, it’s the new normal. It is because it makes us better warfighters. We’re not doing this to be green, although it’s got some great side effects on climate change, on lower carbon, this sort of stuff. But it makes us better at what we do. I don’t think any secretary would say I want to be worse as a fighting force.

The Marines are a great example. We were losing a Marine, killed or wounded, for every 50 convoys of fuel we brought into Afghanistan. That’s way too high a price to pay. So the Marines have led the way in terms of changing how we get energy, how we use energy and this sort of thing. I don’t think any secretary is going to say, “No, I want to put more Marines at risk, I want to turn this thing around.”

Now it’s not me, it’s not coming from this office. Where you’re seeing the real movement is in the fleet, is with the petty officers, is with the junior officers who see the change, see how it makes us better warfighters, and have embraced it and I don’t think anybody will try to change it because it has made us a better warfighting institution.

The last thing I’ll say is geopolitically, the example I give, in Singapore, there are two refineries pretty close to each other. One’s an oil refinery that’s majority owned by the Chinese. Right down the road is a biofuel refinery that’s owned by a Finnish company. I don’t want our fleet to be dependent on China for fuel, and I want it to be able to switch fuels and move between fuels as the situation demands.

I don’t think any secretary would say, “Yeah, let’s be dependent on China in that part of the world for our fuel.”

“The military and the protection of this country should not be a political issue,” said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. (AP Photo)

Examiner: You’ve sort of led the charge with personnel reform, touching on some things like maternity leave that Defense Secretary Ash Carter then went and changed, and actually ended up cutting the maternity leave that you had set for female sailors. Do you think personnel decisions like this should be DoD-level decisions that are made by the secretary of defense, or do you think they should be set by the individual service?

Mabus: I’ll answer it a little bit differently. I do think that our services are unique. One size usually doesn’t fit all in any sort of thing. For the Navy, the Marine Corps, we’re far more expeditionary. We deploy equally in times of peace and in times of war, we just don’t ever come home for any length of time.

That’s a very different template from the Army and the Air Force. We’re more like police, we’re out on the beat every day, the cop that walks a beat. They’re more like firefighters. If there’s a fire, they go fight it. But then they come back to the firehouse. They train and show that they can fight these fires, and they have some auxiliary fire departments in places like Korea and Europe, but it’s a very different sort of organizational structure.

For that reason, I think, and I’m not just talking about personnel, I think in a lot of things, service-specific solutions tend to be the most tailored for those services that when you go wider than that, it tends to be the lowest and slowest common denominator. So instead of something that’ll fit that service and its unique roles and responsibilities and its unique place in our defense.

Examiner: While you’ve been serving as secretary, the military has seen some of the most historic personnel changes, from opening all combat positions to women to launching this transgender working group. What other personnel reforms would you like to see, or what do you think should come next?

Mabus: At Annapolis a year ago, I laid out some of the things that we were doing to move personnel changes. And we’re going down the road on these. It’s everything from promoting more on merit than on year group. It’s things like the career intermission program, which says you can take up to three years off for any reason, now you owe us two years back for every year you take off, but it won’t hurt your career. You’ll compete when you come back with people from three years later, not the folks that stayed on active duty.

It’s stuff like making a career path far more flexible, so that if you miss checking a box, it’s not a career-ender. You can still progress, you can still make it to the highest levels. That sort of overall structure I think making careers more flexible, making things like not forcing people to choose between service and family, whether it’s opening childcare earlier, keeping it open later, having 24-hour childcare facilities, expanding maternity leave, whatever it is, to keep the force that we have, we don’t have enough women in the Navy or the Marine Corps.

We lose twice as many women from year six to year 12. It’s almost always to have a family, and it’s almost always the woman in a dual military couple who leaves. So if we can make service more flexible, if we can make it more family friendly, if we can do co-location policies for two military spouse families, we can do things like this.

Very selfishly, if you lose an aviator after eight years, you’ve lost that experience, you’ve lost all that investment that you’ve made and you’ve got to start over. Same thing with submariner or surface warfare or intel, you name it. If we can keep those people by making it a little more flexible, then we’re way ahead of the game.

We’re going to save money. We’re going to keep talent. The other thing is that the reason to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the reason to open all ground combat positions to women, the reason to open these doors wider is a more diverse force is a stronger force. Not diversity so much in terms of gender or color or anything like that, but diversity in terms of thought.

We don’t want a force that all thinks in the same way. We don’t want a force that has the same background, we don’t want a force that has the same experiences because if we become too homogenous, if we become too predictable, we’re going to have a much tougher time as a military. One of the things that came out in the Marine test: You had an eight-foot wall that everybody had to get over.

The guys went over one at a time and if they had a hard time, they just kept going until they either made it or they didn’t. When the first woman hit it, the other women showed up, helped her up, they formed a chain and did it. That’s the kind of different thinking that you want. And at some point, somebody is going to say if you’re in combat, why are we going over this wall? Why don’t we go around it?

You want that diversity, particularly that diversity of thought and experience and background that will make us a far more effective, far more lethal combat force.

“For the Navy, the Marine Corps, we’re far more expeditionary. We deploy equally in times of peace and in times of war, we just don’t ever come home for any length of time,” said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. (AP Photo)

Examiner: A lot of the personnel changes you were just talking about sound a lot like Carter’s Force of the Future initiative, which has fallen somewhat flat on Capitol Hill. Do you think lawmakers are being shortsighted for not supporting these types of personnel changes?

Mabus: Everything I just talked about, the career intermission program, that was a congressional program. It was a pilot program for five years. We were having problems with filling that program because if it’s got pilot in the front, people don’t trust you, they say you’re going to end that. Congress last year in the 2016 NDAA took the pilot off and expanded it.

We had 30 slots before, now we have as many slots as we want. So on a lot of these initiatives, Congress has been very, very supportive once you make the case of here’s the issue, here’s what we’re trying to fix. So I can only speak to what we’re doing in Navy, and as I said, I made the speech outlining the policy changes that we were going to make.

And most of them were things that we could do, things that we didn’t have to have specific congressional authorization, we already had that under our Title 10 authority to recruit, train and equip.

So on things like the career intermission program, where we had a specific issue, working with Congress, they were very responsive to that and to the fact that this is a good program, that it’s been working well, but that because it was good, the pilot worked and they just took off the pilot, they removed the cap on it and it wasn’t that big a deal.

Examiner: Another controversial decision from you, you’ve taken some heat over the course of your service as secretary for your ship names, most recently the USS Carl Levin. Just wondering if you have any response to those critics?

Mabus: Who can criticize Carl Levin? Congress required a report about three years ago on ship-naming practices of me and all the previous secretaries of the Navy. I’m more a traditionalist than most of my predecessors have been. Carl Levin was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee for years.

There’s the John Stennis, an aircraft carrier, he was chairman of the armed services committee for years. There’s the John Warner, a submarine, he was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee for years. There’s the Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, he was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee for years.

So this is a long-standing tradition to name Navy ships after members of Congress, particularly the heads of armed services committees from both the Senate and the House, but those who have gone above and beyond in terms of protecting particularly our service men and women, who have shown a dedication over many years to making sure that they got the tools, the facilities.

On a bigger thing, I think our ship names ought to reflect values we cherish. And Carl Levin exemplified the values of: He was tough, but he was fair. He tried to protect the taxpayers and their money, but he also had a deep, deep commitment to protecting our servicemen and women, to getting them what they needed.

And in an era of increasing incivility in politics, in Congress, Carl Levin was a beacon of civility. I think you honor things like that. And again, it’s a very traditional thing to do. It’s not outside the mainstream at all.

“Who can criticize Carl Levin? Congress required a report about three years ago on ship-naming practices of me and all the previous secretaries of the Navy,” said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. (AP Photo)

Examiner: At the end of this year, you will be done with your tenure as secretary of the Navy. Are there any concrete priorities you can talk about? Things you really want to check off before you leave?

Mabus: You know, I’m proud of where we are in Navy and how far we’ve come. The four things that you’ve touched on, the people, the personnel initiatives that we’ve undertaken, the platforms, building more ships, more capability in those ships and we’ve also bought 35 percent more aircraft in these seven years, and keeping our edge in technology and research, so the next generation weapon system, the next generation cyber, the next generation ship or aircraft, we’re still on the cutting edge.

The power, the taking energy away as a potential weapon to be used against us and finally the partnerships, I travel a lot and I go to see sailors and Marines where they are, where they’re forward deployed. I also go to talk to our international friends and allies and I go to talk to the people of the United States.

The Navy and Marine Corps are America’s away team. We never get a home game. And people don’t see their sailors and Marines much. They’re not in port much, they’re not at home that much. Part of my job I think and part of anybody’s job who has this position is to explain what the jobs that we’re asking them to do, what our high expectations are, how they have never disappointed us, how tough the jobs are and how good they are at doing it, and why they are crucial, why they are essential to our protection.

Why? Because they’re standing the watch 24 hours a day. We can do in this country what we have taken for granted in terms of the lives that we lead and in terms of the security that we enjoy.

Examiner: One last question for you. We’re here in your dining room in the Pentagon. There’s a lot of really cool memorabilia around. I’m wondering if you can tell me about this flag hanging on the back wall.

Mabus: That was carried by the Marines in World War I. It’s a battle color that was carried by the Marines when they went in to places like Belleau Wood and Chateau Thierry. It’s a very historic flag and it represents a couple of things. It represents the continuity. Somebody has had this job since 1798. There’s been a secretary of the Navy for that long.

The second thing it represents is the sacrifice that our Marines and our sailors have made over the course of this country. And finally, you said I’ve been here for a while. I’m the longest serving secretary since WWI. So for the last 100 years, I’ve held this position longer. That flag flew under the secretary that held it longer, and that was Josephus Daniels in WWI. He had an assistant secretary named Franklin Roosevelt.