America at Sea: Voices That Matter continues with CDR Salamander, the retired Navy commander whose writing on naval affairs has been required reading for years [1]. He served 21 years on active duty, from Desert Storm to Afghanistan, and today he’s one of the sharpest independent voices on the Navy we have.
We asked him the same three questions we ask everyone. His answers go past the usual talking points to people, bureaucracy and focus. Watch below.
Join the conversation. Reply to the post above on X and tell us what’s working, what’s in the way, and what you’d fix first. Not on X? Reach us through StrongerNavy.org.
What we heard
What’s working: people. Everything in uniform, he says, funnels down to a young man or woman holding the line. Budgets and programs don’t matter without the right people. He points to the Navy and the other services meeting their recruiting goals early two years running, and to Navy retention above 100% across the first 14 years of service, by the figures he cites.
“People are policy. People run programs. People work budgets.” — CDR Salamander
What’s in the way: bureaucracy and the defense industrial base. We still run on a system built around Goldwater-Nichols in 1986, when the worry was the Soviet Northern Fleet. Consolidation in the 1990s left a few big prime contractors. And when billions go to stock buybacks, he says, that money isn’t going to higher pay for welders and shipfitters, better shipyards or capital investment.
“Like any other large object with a lot of inertia, when you stop pushing on it, it regresses to the mean. This is going to require sustained efforts.” — CDR Salamander
What he’d fix first: mindset and focus. Do it in a bipartisan way. Look at a map: America is a maritime and aerospace power, and that’s our competitive advantage. Fund and focus to match, out to space, and be willing to take risk elsewhere, including moving more ground forces into the Guard and Reserve and building up the Naval Reserve.
“We are a maritime and aerospace power. That also happens to be our competitive advantage.” — CDR Salamander
And the ships? More “holes in the water” follow from getting the focus right, he says. But the sealift, prepositioning and merchant marine we’d need to sustain a fight across the Pacific are in rough shape. He notes that two replenishment ships earned the Presidential Unit Citation for operations off Iran this year because they “did almost the impossible,” and says that shouldn’t have to be the expectation.
The three questions
1. What’s working right now that we should do more of?
2. What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?
3. If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?
We’ll post each new voice here over the coming weeks. At the end of November, we’ll publish a common-ground report: what these voices agree on, in their own words.
Transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
Introduction
I’ve been telling people for a long time, I’m kind of your standard issue. Retired U.S. Navy O-5, commander. I did 21 years on active duty, did a lot of deployments, and I left active duty in 2009. My first deployment was Desert Storm, so I’m one of the cohort of baby junior officers who got the last end of the Cold War, got to chase the Soviets around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean a bit, did the Desert Storm thing as well. My last deployment, back in 2009, I came home about four months before I went on terminal leave, after a deployment to Afghanistan. So I kind of did the broad, older-cohort Gen X standard issue. Nothing too dramatic, nothing very exciting. My experience was in line with kind of the center of the curve, so to speak.
What’s working right now that we should do more of?
What’s working? It’s always fun and exciting, and goodness knows I do it. Today I wrote a little bit about long-range anti-ship missiles and having the Air Force do a little bit of our sea control. Many people will go back to their comfort spot on the tactical level. I was an operational planner for years, so I love talking about courses of action and decisive points and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, and this may be a funny thing for a person from the Navy to say, everybody who wears a uniform or supports them, it all funnels toward a young man or woman standing on a street corner holding a long arm, looking around and going, “This is mine, not yours. I control it.”
That’s people. People are policy. People run programs. People work budgets. You can have great budgets and great programs, but if you don’t have the right people, you’re going to have some trouble. In the volunteer system that we have, nobody’s drafted. There are no great levies on the population to fill the spots that we need. You have to create an environment where people not only want to join, but they want to stay. And we are a type of society where people do have choices.
There are some people who wouldn’t know what to do if they ever got out of the military. I originally was one of those guys. I’m not an academy guy; I was a contract ROTC guy. I was going to do a few years because I didn’t like communists, and then I was going to go get a real job in the civilian world. And as my wife reminds me, I didn’t do that. I stayed in and made a full career out of it. But you have to have a situation where people not only have a job that they value, but they think is valuable and is worth staying in for. And not everybody has to make a career out of it. Sometimes people do one or two tours.
A primary indicator when things are not working is when you can’t get people to join, and when you can’t get the ones that you have to stay. And numbers matter. You don’t want just the bare minimum. You want more than the bare minimum so you can do a quality cut, where you don’t have to take everybody. Those that maybe don’t have the best indicators for future success in uniform can be invited to pursue excellence elsewhere: don’t bring them on board, or they don’t re-enlist.
We’ve heard recently that the Navy and the other services, for the last two years, have reached their recruiting goals early. That means they were bringing in new men and women, and for those that like demographics, every year there are fewer people you can recruit, just because there are fewer children than what we had seen previously. So that’s getting new people into the pipeline.
But especially in our military, which is very high tech, it requires a lot of training, years of training for some specialties, before you’re actually usable to the combatant commanders. Retaining your smart people is what you want to do. I dug around a bit and found these figures, and I think they’re pretty good. Officer figures are difficult to come by, but from what I’ve seen from the Chief of Naval Personnel, and I’m just focusing on the Navy here, there’s been a steady increase in officer retention over the last three years, which is where you want to go.
On the enlisted side of the house, everybody who’s been involved in mentoring sailors, bringing sailors up, giving them jobs, letting them know why their jobs are important and rewarding them, should all give themselves a pat on the back, or get a little gold anchor to hang off their door or something. Zone A, for those that aren’t familiar with the manpower side of the house, is people who’ve been in zero to six years: 108.9% retention. Zone B, six to 10 years: 117.9%, we’ll call it 118. And Zone C, 10 to 14 years in the service: 111.3%. So that, I think, is what’s working. We’re bringing in the people that we need, and we’re retaining more than what we need, which is good, because that way you have more people on the right end of the bell curve to put in your critical jobs.
What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?
So, okay, we’ve got the people coming in. We’re keeping people. So what tools are we giving them? That’s what I think is in the way. And this isn’t unique to the U.S. military or the U.S. government. There’s a reason for phrases like “Ottoman bureaucracy” or “that’s Byzantine,” or, for those who have had to deal with European bureaucracies, “I’m sorry, that’s not possible.” It’s just the nature of bureaucracies.
I think it’s kind of embarrassing that a communist government, the People’s Republic of China, seems to be experimenting and building and innovating a little bit faster than we are. Some of it might be Potemkin, but holes in the water are holes in the water. Compared to where they were 20 years ago, tremendous advancements. I think our bureaucracy is the thing that’s in the way, with these programs, these systems, and people you can’t fire. I almost wrote about it today, and I may do it next week: an IG report where, instead of one person accusing someone, you had dozens and dozens of people accusing a senior executive. It had been a known problem for years, and they just couldn’t get rid of her. When you read the summary, she worked in the IG’s office, of all things. It gives people a little flavor of how difficult it is to move people. Going back to the first point: people are policy. And civil service reform is a dead letter, for a variety of reasons.
We have laws, and we have policies, and we have instructions. The one I like to use is Goldwater-Nichols, 1986. That’s when our biggest worry was the Red Banner Northern Fleet, Admiral Gorshkov’s children coming over North Cape, west of Bear Island. We still live under that system, and since it came on board, it’s developed all these accretions, all these additions, all these refinements, so that it’s not really fit for the 21st century. Time flies when you’re having fun. We’re already in the second quarter of the 21st century, and we’re still living inside a construct whose foundation is based in 1986. So the bureaucracy has got to change.
We also have a big problem that’s the byproduct of Perry’s “Last Supper” in the 1990s, with defense consolidation. We have what we call the primes, our prime defense contractors, and there aren’t that many options. Boeing is going to be building both the F-47 and whatever we end up calling the new Navy fighter. You’ve got Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman. There’s not much competition there.
Corporate governance is important, because it establishes priorities and it establishes short-term and long-term requirements. One of the problems with the primes being publicly traded companies is their boards. I love my defense primes. Every time I talk to those folks, they have great professionals working for them. But I’d encourage everybody to go look at their boards of directors, look at the backgrounds of the board members, all publicly available, and look at who the primary shareholders are. Shareholders vote. If you own a pension fund, you’ve got BlackRock, you’ve got Vanguard, you’ve got Fidelity, and a couple of others in there. Their primary goal is not national defense. Their primary goal is shareholder value. General Dynamics is one of the companies that actually has a fair bit of private money coming in.
When you’re spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks, and that’s money coming from the federal government paying for weapons systems, you’re not paying larger salaries for your welders, your shipfitters, your staff. You’re not improving shipyards. You’re not doing capital investment. You’re buying back your own stock to get incremental, in some places fractions of a cent per share, advances in share price, because that benefits the shareholders, Vanguard and BlackRock, who own the majority of the stock and get to pick the board members who make those decisions. And I’ll give the administration credit: inside the last year, they’ve started some moves in that regard.
So those are the things I think are in the way. Our bureaucracy is not moving as fast as the executive branch and the legislative branch would like to see things move. There’s progress there. But like any other large object with a lot of inertia, a lot of mass, a lot of density, when you stop pushing on it, it regresses to the mean. So this is going to require sustained efforts.
If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?
The first thing is, and this needs to be done in a bipartisan way, both what’s in the way and what you’d fix first. Because if it becomes a partisan thing, national defense isn’t going to benefit, people wearing the uniform aren’t going to benefit, our allies aren’t going to benefit. Who’s going to benefit are those whose self-interest lies in other things besides national defense and allied defense.
So I would like a conversation that will upset people in Congress, too, because you’re going to upset some rice bowls. But it’s something I’ve advocated for a long time. And I know I wear blue and gold here. Fine. However, I put myself on equal footing with my boys in blue here.
I encourage everybody: everybody should have a map on the wall. If they don’t, they should definitely have a little globe, or a big globe. I have a big globe, about three feet in diameter, that I keep in my library. Look at the map. Go on Google Earth if you have to, and do a couple of great circle routes to where most of the threats to our national security lie. We are a maritime and aerospace power. That also happens to be our competitive advantage. Yes, the Chinese now have the world’s largest navy, but are their Type 055s the same as our Flight IIA Arleigh Burkes? Probably not, because we have a lot of combat experience, especially over the last few years, and we’ve been able to refine our systems. Our technology is the best. China’s trying to steal its way into a capability that looks like SpaceX, but they don’t have a SpaceX.
And when I say aerospace power, I’m not just talking about the B-21 Raider. I’m talking about low Earth orbit, cislunar space, I think is what the cool kids call it. We have to dominate space between here and the Moon, because if we don’t, the Chinese will. Do you want the rest of the solar system to run on the language, the culture, the policies and the rule of law of the U.S., the European Union, Japan, Australia and Korea? Or do you want it run by the authoritarian Chinese, with an assist from the Russians? I think you want the former. And to properly fund it, and not just fund it but focus the mind of everybody within a commute of D.C., whether you work in the Pentagon, at a think tank, as a congressional staffer, or you’re a member of Congress, you need to be thinking about the United States as a maritime and aerospace power.
We have to be willing to assume risk on what we are not. We are not a continental land power. We do not need huge standing armies. When you look at our obligations overseas through our alliances, not just NATO but our alliances with Japan, Australia and a few others, these are nations, especially on continental Europe, that are land powers, whether they want to spend on it or not. France, Germany and Poland should be able to hold the land just fine. We can help them in the aerospace and maritime domains. And if they do need our ground forces, we should have the balance of our ground forces, except for a few high-readiness, highly expeditionary forces, in the National Guard and the Reserves.
Does that mean, like we saw in Desert Storm, that it takes a while to get those units up to speed, compared to a large active-duty armored or infantry division? Sure does. And this is where my opinion gets unpopular with people. But that gives the American people and our government, as designed, with the executive and the legislative branch, time to decide together: yes, this issue, whatever and wherever it is, is worth the national effort, worth telling a whole bunch of constituents, “Shipmate, it’s not one weekend a month and two weeks in the summertime.” Though for the last 20 years that’s not been true either. You’re getting activated, and you’re probably going to war. That requires a lot more national buy-in than you have with a large standing ground force. I’d also like to see more in the Naval Reserve than what we’re doing. The Air Force recaptures a lot of its active-duty experience in the Reserve and the Air National Guard. The Navy, I think, has always shortchanged that capability.
So what I’d fix first is the mindset and the focus, toward a maritime and aerospace power, with extra emphasis on space. I grew up with Star Trek, and they were ahead of their time: it is the final frontier. If you look at it from a civilizational and a species point of view, 200 years from now I would much rather have the people managing resource extraction in the asteroid belt have a union, an appeals process and contracts subject to tort claims, than a system where if you don’t meet your quota, you wind up mining the asteroid yourself until you die, which is what you have in authoritarian systems.
Bill Cullifer: How about holes in the water?
Holes in the water, I think, will come as a byproduct of emphasizing that we’re a maritime and aerospace power. I remember one of my friends came back from being a third-tier junior officer at one of our large war games in the 1990s, updating our operations plan for Korea. He came back and said, “We don’t have enough to do what they want to do, but we’re going to pretend we do.” And I thought, that’s true. If we can get the focus right, we can get more holes in the water, and more shadows on the ramp.
Our commitments are mostly overseas, or across the Caribbean if you’re Venezuela, I guess. That requires strategic airlift and strategic sealift, and we barely have enough of that. We’re flying the wings off our C-17s as it is, and we don’t have a heavy-lift strategic airlifter in production. If you’re over 40, you may not have looked at what has happened to our Maritime Prepositioning Force, which existed in pretty good numbers as late as 2010, or the state of the merchant marine that is supposed to sustain us. It’s nightmarish, if you look at sustaining combat operations west of the International Date Line, which we’ll be required to do.
There’s a reason two replenishment ships received the Presidential Unit Citation, an award usually given to submarines that do things nobody can talk about, for operations off Iran this year. They did almost the impossible, and everybody should be really proud of what they did. But that shouldn’t be the expectation. We shouldn’t have to create miracles on a regular basis. We should have the funding and the foresight to have a merchant marine and auxiliary force that can actually support our forces forward.
While we argue, China plans. It’s time we started building.
References
[1] CDR Salamander, Substack: https://cdrsalamander.substack.com
