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From the top: CNO on China, InSurvs, pirates

Navy Times interviewed Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead three times over the March and April timeframe during a tour of Gulf Coast shipyards and a ship commissioning ceremony in South Carolina.

During those months he toured several ships now under construction, traveled to South Africa and China to meet his counterparts, and watched as his ships faced down pirates off Somalia in a dramatic showdown that captured worldwide attention.

As Roughead has said, “We are a busy Navy right now.”

During his pierside speech in Charleston, S.C., for the commissioning of the destroyer Truxtun on April 25, Roughead spoke about being “at an inflection point in our history.” It’s a time in which the Navy must determine how it will live up to its mission in the globalized world, given potential competitors such as China, and at a time when the high costs of manpower and equipment loom.

What follows is a summation of his thoughts on several topics gathered over those three hours of interviews.

Bad ship inspections

I’ll be interested to see the report [summarizing 2008’s ship inspections, in which six ships were deemed “unfit”]. I don’t turn away from the assessments we do, and I’ll take a look at it and where we go to fix the deficiencies. I do think that by backing off an engineered process for long-life surface ship maintenance that we are likely not optimizing maintenance dollars. We may not be spending where we need to and, equally important, we may be spending money on maintenance we don’t have to. So, the [Surface Ship Lifecycle Management Activity] is going to allow us to better align that maintenance funding where it needs to be. Then we’ll be taking a look at training and not only how do we teach the technicians, but I would submit if you go to our Surface Warfare Officer School, we have injected more of what we used to have in a course called Senior Officer Ship Material Readiness Course. ... The commander up at SWOS is injecting more of some of those fundamental maintenance processes and technical training and getting heads back in that game again.

Classified InSurvs

I think that the information that potential adversaries can glean from detailed technical reports doesn’t help us. For that reason, I think it’s appropriate to classify some of that information [from the Board of Inspection and Survey]. I am also very comfortable, if someone wants a copy of those reports, that we might be able to do some redaction and provide the type of information somebody might be interested in. But to me it’s almost tantamount to taking a football team, a week before the game, and talking about how everybody is doing. I do not shy away from bad news. Bad news is [a] good thing to know. So if anyone thinks I am trying to hide bad news, that’s not me. That’s not me. It was never intended to screen it from the press or anything like that.

Our sense was, there’s enough information in [a report] that you can determine where some vulnerabilities might be. A lot of the stuff that’s in InSurv reports is not bad maintenance practices and it’s not maintenance. The InSurv [inspectors] document a lot of stuff, some of which is a function of the design. It may talk about a system shortcoming that’s part of the design, and until it gets fixed, it can be a vulnerability. I mean, I would love to get InSurv reports on the [Chinese] navy and on the Russian navy. Out of my professional interest, I’d like to do that.

Submarine mishaps

There is always a tendency after a notable event and people ask, “Are you going to do a stand-down?” But I’ve been intimately familiar with what we’re doing in the submarine world, and I’m not ready to throw submarine forces into a stand-down. I don’t see a systemic issue. We’ll learn from the [attack submarine] Hartford [collision] investigation. We’ll take a look and see what the causes of that were, and look and see if we have to make any adjustments. Until we know what happened, we’re a busy Navy right now and I am comfortable the commanders are focused on the right things and we don’t have to shut everything down.

Shipbuilding issues

Often you’ll hear people say shipbuilding is broken. When you see a ship like Truxtun at the pier, it’s hard to believe American shipbuilding is broken. [There] may [be] some things we have to do in the acquisition process, but nobody builds ships, submarines or airplanes like we do, so the “broken” mantra is a little bit of an overstatement. I’d say a lot of an overstatement.

It needs to be examined. We need to look at roles and responsibilities again and some of the processes and the lengthy time it takes to turn things. Especially in areas like command and control and information technology, I think that our process is a speed brake on trying to introduce new technology very quickly.

Crew size of the littoral combat ship Independence

It’s a big ship. Just what I call the “facilities maintenance” is huge. And when that ship comes into port, whether that’s in its home port or it’s deployed, the concept has to support facilities maintenance and preventive maintenance.

We need to think of the best way to operate the ship and maintain the ship with 40 people and not being overly consumed with cosmetics. Cosmetics are man-hours.

I don’t like anything that creates work.

Cutting steaming days and flying hours

Operating on an annual budget, we take a midyear look. This time I went a little earlier than mid-year because of the cost issues we were seeing. We looked at what the demands are and what we thought the demands a couple years ago were going to be. The Navy is doing a whole lot more now than we envisioned a couple years ago when the budget submissions were put together. So we throttled back on some nondeployed operations. The one thing we have held on to date is we’ve not cut any of the maintenance. I know there was a lot of angst and concern about canceling availabilities. We’ve held on to that.

Gaining flexibility

We are having to think this through in such ways that in a more flush time we’d just throw money at it. I think we’re going to be better off. I think it is causing us to really take a look at tighter solutions, more flexible solutions, more collaborative solutions. This is a pretty good forcing function to make that happen. I’m not saying it’s easy, or that I want to do this forever and ever, but I do think some good will come out of it.

I think what it will produce is sailors who are much more flexible and much more versatile. I think quite frankly our [individual augmentee] experience is producing a sailor who has a much broader view, more of a worldview than I’ve ever seen before.

Anti-piracy efforts

There is a shortage of resources. There are [two dozen warships] covering four times the size of Texas. My view on piracy is, pirates don’t live at sea. Pirates move their money ashore. So the strategy has to be one of deterring and responding and disrupting activities at sea, but the solution is ashore. That’s the way it was solved in the Strait of Malacca.

You act at sea, but you have to have the rule of law present to be able to apprehend and prosecute pirates ashore. And that’s what’s missing in Somalia. There’s no rule of law. There’s no order in Somalia. And it’s also a very lucrative business right now. If you wanted to cover that area and be able to respond in 10 minutes, then you’re taking about 1,200 warships.

We are providing cover for the region, and we are mindful of where the American ships [like Maersk Alabama] are, and we are working cooperatively with all the forces there.

What we are all working to do is stop the piracy, and our piece is predominately offshore. But I can tell you we are recognizing it is ashore and [asking] what is the right way to do that. We are going to continue to work on getting piracy stopped. The issue is ashore.

Chinese ships harassing U.S. surveillance vessel

We [Roughead and the head of China’s navy, Adm. Wu Sheng Li] had talked on the phone shortly after that. We had an opportunity to share our views and basically, and you may have seen it in the public record, I’m not sure that China and the U.S. will agree on the law that applies in the Exclusive Economic Zone. We interpret the law to allow us to do military surveillance operations in the zone; they interpret the law to make the zone more exclusive of all things. I think he and I are in agreement that we are going to disagree on the interpretation of the law. But my point that I made then and I made this time is that what we can agree on is, there should be nothing done to endanger our sailors or our ships that are operating there.

We are out and about. That’s what our Navy does.

Touring Chinese ships

It clearly was an opportunity for the [Chinese] navy to show itself, and they did. They had a fairly significant fleet review.

I wouldn’t say it was a statement of their intentions, but it was clearly a good view into their capabilities and the types of things they have on their mind.

In times past I was toured around [a Chinese] ship by the commanding officer and an interpreter. And this time, at multiple stations on the ship I was briefed on that particular area by a young junior officer in English. That was pretty significant.

I point-blank asked Wu Sheng Li, “So we’re hearing you’re going to announce an aircraft carrier.” And he said, “We’re not there.”

But I know and I shared with him, we know the development is going on. They’ve had an ambition for an aircraft carrier since the ’90s. They have a very methodical approach. And they are working down that timeline. The [Chinese] navy is going to have an aircraft carrier some day. That’s just my assessment of it. How they elect to use it and where they operate it is the big question.

New destroyers and cruisers

What I am trying to do is not simply build ships to build ships, but rather to build what I believe we need. That’s behind my move to truncate the [DDG] 1000. And the [DDG] 51, while some people will say it’s old technology, I can guarantee you that Truxtun is not the Arleigh Burke, a far cry from it. What that ship gives is the ability to do integrated air and missile defense and for me, that is very important because of the proliferation of cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. I am really pleased with LCS. We’ve got the first one out. And LCS 2 is in the high 80s [percent] of completion, so I am really pleased with what I am seeing there. I am very pleased that [what] we’ve proposed is what I would call the endorsement for LCS to move forward in the budget for ’10, and there’s the agreement that we’re starting the [DDG] 51 line again.

With regard to CG(X), rather than say we’re going to run off and build CG(X), I really believe we need to have a good definition of the total ballistic-missile defense architecture is going to be for the department writ large.

DDG 1000 as a precursor to CG(X)

I think DDG 1000 is going to be a huge informant of CG(X), and that’s why I was more interested in truncating [to three hulls] rather than terminating. We can get a couple of the ships out and run them around and see what they do and see if the technologies we put on there will really pay off for us. I am very interested in the hull form. I am really interested in the hull form. How does it perform? Is that the path to go down? It’s a pretty radical departure. We’ve tested it. We’ve modeled it. The program office is very thorough. But there is no other designer in the world who has pursued that hull form.

I’d like to see how it goes. And if it really is a breakthrough technology, can it be scaled up and can it be scaled down? Because if you start getting into nuclear power and bigger radars, can the DDG hull form take it? My sense is, it can. But if it can’t and you have to scale up, does it scale?

Intent for DDG 1000s

There’s no question we will employ those ships once they’re delivered. Deploy them and employ. I see them in the deployment rotation because, quite frankly, it will be important to operate those ships in different environments, get them up in the high latitudes. What happens when that hull form starts to ice up? What’s the effect of that? If people are talking about having to be up in the Arctic areas, it’s a good thing to know. How well are they sustained logistically at great distances? We’ve got to get them out. Get them deployed.

Nuclear-powered warships

I think it’s time we take a fundamental look at what we’re doing with our surface combatants, what we’re trying to do with them, how they fit in the big picture and on this nuclear-power thing. When [Reps.] Roscoe Bartlett [R-Md.] and Gene Taylor [D-Miss.] first brought it up, there was a connection to the price of gas. That’s where I think a lot of folks’ heads were.

But as we had a discussion with them, you have to take into account the projected price of fuel that we’ve seen, just in the past few years, fluctuate pretty wildly.

But I do have concerns about the amount of fuel that’s going to be out there at the end of the service life of the CG(X). I mean, I really do worry about that. But you have price of fuel, you have price of construction, you have price of maintenance, you have price of manpower. For nuclear ships, the last four are really expensive.

So that’s a factor that has to be taken in [to account] when you build a ship — it doesn’t offset. ...

Unmanned aerial vehicles

With unmanned systems, it’s a new capability, if you will, and because it’s unmanned, we’re unfamiliar with it. I think we’re more conservative than we have to be. I think the technology allows us to go a little faster.

Should the [Fire Scout helicopter] be part of a composite squadron of UAVs, or should it be part of a helicopter squadron? What is the right organization for us to do two things — one is maximum operational flexibility and the other is minimizing the manpower. Folks tend to think of unmanned systems as unmanned. They’re pilotless systems. There is no system in the Navy that’s unmanned. Manpower is required to do it. How do we make sure we’re optimizing the organization?