Rebooting the US Navy

streiff:

 Trump Picks Navy Outsider to Fix a Thoroughly Broken Service

 

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated billionaire investment fund manager and Republican megadonor John Phelan as the 79th Secretary of the Navy.

It is my great honor to announce John Phelan as our next United States Secretary of the Navy! John will be a tremendous force for our Naval Servicemembers, and a steadfast leader in advancing my America First vision. He will put the business of the U.S. Navy above all else.

John has excelled in every endeavor, from founding and leading Rugger Management LLC, to co-founding MSD Capital, LP, the Private Investment Firm for Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Techologies. His Record of Success speaks for itself — A true Champion of American Enterprise and Ingenuity!

John's intelligence and leadership are unmatched. John holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and is a truly brilliant guy! His incredible knowledge and experience will elevate the lives of the brave Americans who serve our Nation, John will deliver real results for our Navy and our Country. I look forward to working with him.

Congratulations, John — Together, we will MAKE AMERICA STRONG AGAIN!

 The challenges facing Phelan are daunting. The Navy is THE vital service in any conflict with China but from an outsider's perspective, that service seems not only broken but content in being unable to carry out its mission.

Navy shipbuilding is in the sewer. The organization that manages the shipbuilding life cycle for the Navy, NAVSEA, has 86,000 people. The ships it designs have gone from being best-in-class to laughingstock. The highly touted "Littoral Combat Ship"  has not been deployed to the theater for which it was intended, the Red Sea, because its missile magazines carry too few missiles to defend itself against the Houthis. A plan to buy an off-the-shelf cruiser design to replace the Aegis cruisers now being retired has become a joke after the "good idea fairy" got a hold on the project. The USS Connecticut, a Seawolf-class fast attack submarine, hit an "uncharted" undersea mountain in 2021. It is still in the shipyard. Allegedly, it will return to duty in September 2025, four years after the accident.

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We are decommissioning more ships than we are launching while China is conducting a peacetime naval expansion, the likes of which has never before been seen.

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The Navy needs fixing and it looks like the current leadership is not capable of doing that.  Phelan's background shows he has leadership skills.  As a former Navy leader said, "We need fast ships because we are going in harm's way."  The US and Japan already need the resources to meet the China challenge.  Currently, the US appears to be struggling to meet the challenge of the Houthis.

 

The Secretary's job is not Navy, it is administrative. His job is to ensure the admirals have a Navy that can carry out their mission.

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