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Chief of Naval Operations
Admiral Gary Roughead
Center for Strategic and International Studies
May 1, 2009
Thanks. It’s great to be here. It’s always nice to see so many familiar faces, collogues and shipmates over the years. And it is true that I do pick my returns to Washington on tenure centers to use a shipbuilding term, but it has been great to be back. It’s been about a year and a half since I relieved Mike Mullen as the Chief of Naval Operations and the time has flown by. IN fact, I’ll get some feedback from you what Washington is like because for the last month or so I’ve been out and about. Made the first by U.S. Chief of Naval Operations to South Africa which was a very worthwhile trip and an opportunity to reconnect with my counterpart who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for the past year and a half. Hosted the First Sea Lord, my UK counterpart here the weekend after that. And the weekend after that went to China for my fourth visit and my third time with my counterpart Adm. Wu Sheng Li to participate in their 60th anniversary of the founding of the PLA Navy which was a very worthwhile trip and one that I believe is important as we move forward with our relationship with China.
So, it has been busy. That spurt of travel came after a period of time staying pretty close to the tent here in D.C. as we worked out 2010 budget. My philosophy is when they are working on your budget, you don’t go far from home because others will work it for you if you’re not there and so with that said, I found the process- and I know there’s been some things written about it- but I found the process to be very fair, very open, very high level of professional discussions that allowed us to address the very subtenant thing that one would expect of the Department and the leaders of the services to be engaged in. I can’t say enough about the leadership, the involvement and the support of Secretary Gates. The time that he spent in the budget discussions, in the lead up to the budget discussions, and availing himself to those of us who were involved in those discussions to me has been said from my touch and go’s in Washington, I found involvement in his leadership to be extraordinary in that regard.
We made some decisions based on capabilities that I think as a person who comes from the fleet were exactly the way we needed to come at the problem. And I would say that what we did reaffirms the direction that I had set for the Navy when I came into this office. But now we’re at a time where I believe it is very that we meet these important decisions and challenges head on. What we have been able to do in the Navy over the last year and a half I think has fundamentally set the course for our future. Shortly after coming in and with Secretary Don Winter, made the decision to terminate two ships, littoral combat ships 3 and 4 because in my judgement the cost of those ships were out of control and if we did not get those costs under control I was concerned for the future of that class which I consider to be extraordinarily important to the future of the Navy and the nation and that I predict when it is all said and done, they will be the workhorses of the fleet and the LCS will have a thousand fathers. So we did that and we now have a third LCS under contract. The first one is in commission and operating and I would encourage any of you who would like to see it to head down to Alexandria next week where freedom will be moored as part of our Sea, Air Space symposium that Steve Petropoli here will gladly arrange for any free passes for anyone who wants to go.
We then moved on and made the push to truncate the DDG-1000, a ship that has been in development since the early ‘90s. A program that I would add is extraordinarily well managed it contains some incredible technology that will be important to the fleet. But as I looked at the DDG-1000, it’s combat capabilities were not what we need today and not what I envision us needing in the future. And we made the decision to restart the DDG 51 line because it is in the area of air and missile defense, integrated air and missile defense, and brought our ASW that I am most pressed in regard to bringing those capabilities into our Navy component commanders and into the combatant commanders. We’ve also cancelled some programs because they were not forming. The multi role underwater unmanned vehicle, cancelled that and then a weapons program, Harpoon III, that was not performing and we cancelled that. So my point in all of these is there has to be some tough decisions that are made and it is based on what combat capability we need and the performance of the program and that’s where we’re headed.
But, we’ve also done some other things to address the needs of the Navy of the future. We have stood up an Irregular Warfare Office. It had existed down a lower echelon within the Navy that was working for me while I was the commander at Fleet Forces Command. When I became CNO I brought that organization up into my staff in the Pentagon where we are better able to move money and capitalize on ideas that we believe are helpful to the warfighter. And I would add that an example of this is, for those of you who watched the rescue of the captain of the Maersk Alabama, there was an unmanned vehicle flying off one of our guided missile destroyers. That is not a program of record to be on that ship but through the work of the IW office, we were able to have that unmanned vehicle onboard providing the ISR that I believe was critical. And what the IW office allows me to do is to see those capabilities and move them quickly out. Sometimes the introduction of them is what I call a photo finish and sometimes they don’t deliver the full capability that we envision but if we always go for the perfect, we throw a lot of good out in the process and I don’t think that’s the way that we have to move forward with the Navy
I also had the opportunity to elevate the Director of Naval Intelligence to a three-star position and that has significantly changed and put the Navy’s intel structure back into the game in a big way. And the officer that is filling that position, VADM Jack Dorset, is the best in the business in my book and he has really set us on a good vector as it applies to intelligence in the world that we live in today. Through his leadership we stood up the National Maritime Intelligence Center out in Suitland, Maryland. We’ve also created four other intelligence centers: the Nimitz Operational Intelligence Center which aligns our global network operations centers and provides intelligence to them; the Farragut Technical Analysis Center which is focused on scientific and technological research, development and proliferation of foreign technologies; the Kennedy Irregular Warfare Center which supports Navy Special Warfare and our Expeditionary Combat Command; and the Hopper Information Services Center which provides the mission related information technology. And all that has been done in about one year’s time and Navy intelligence is on the move once again.
The other thing that I’ve been doing is spending a fair amount of time focused on our industrial base. There are some who would say that it’s not the job of the CNO to worry about the industrial base. I worry about the industrial base. It drives decisions and its health and its viability is important to the United States Navy, particularly in the area of shipbuilding where the United States Navy is the force at work for the shipbuilding industry. Allen, I am sure you agree with that.
And we have also worked very hard in this past year to take a look at our budget and move what had been a reliance on supplemental budgets and get that into our base budget so that we have a good understanding of what it takes to run the Navy and as supplementals wax and wane, to minimize the effects on that. For example, we took our Expeditionary Combat Command and now we have that in the base budget. It had been running purely on supplementals which was not a good place for that organization to be, in particularly for the capabilities that we were pushing forward into the fight.
I believe that the QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review] is going to allow us to continue to examine the investments that we’ve made, the programs that we have, and the structures that we use to keep all of that working in a way that it needs to. I am a great proponent of QDR and I know Michele´ Flournoy was here the day before yesterday to talk about her approach and the way that she sees it. I have my QDR rep, Rear Adm. Bill Burke, who is been given the task of orchestrating the Navy’s QDR activities and he may agree with what Tony Cordesman said a few weeks ago, “If God really hates you, he will assign you to the QDR.” Don’t read anything into that. But I really do believe that QDR is a good way for us to get the issues on the table. I talked about some of the directions that we have started to move the Navy. The 10 budget is the start of that and I am pleased with how we as a Navy are standing at the end of that. But QDR is going to be extraordinarily important to us.
As far as how I’m looking at the QDR, to me it’s all about the type of capabilities that we want to put out in the world in which we live, and in which our successors in the Navy will live. And my belief is that we’re going to continue to see a world that is extremely interconnected, but that interconnectedness is very fragile and it is easily disrupted in our disorderly world that we are living in. I’m not an alarmist but I do believe that the disorder that we see is going to continue for some time. I believe that the economic situation that the world finds itself in is going to exacerbate some of that disorder and it will take place in places that navies operate. For an example are the teenage pirates that pirated the Maersk Alabama. I think you are going to continue to see activities like that, increases in transnational criminal activity whether it’s the trafficking of drugs or people or weapons.
We are also going to face threats that I think are going to span a whole spectrum of conflict and our ability as a Navy to operate in that spectrum will be one that will dominate the approach that we take in QDR. The word du jour of hybrid warfare is something that a lot of folks talk about but I would submit the United States Navy has been involved in hybrid warfare for a couple of centuries. It’s kind of ironic that as we chase pirates off the coast of Africa one has to be reminded that we began chasing pirates off the coast of Africa so we’ve kind of gone full circle.
The decisions that I’ve made are based also upon the proliferation of weapons that are taking place those are fairly sophisticated in the form of ballistic missiles., if you look at going back in the beginning of the 90’s about every third year another country develops a ballistic missile capability. So we’re seeing that grow, we’re seeing capabilities grow. We’re seeing anti-ship cruise missiles proliferated. In April of 2006 was an important month because that was when a terrorist group, Hezbollah, fired a fairly sophisticated cruise missile at an Israeli ship and almost sank it. That changes the calculus as you operate in and around littoral areas and that proliferation in my mind is not going to stop. So I don’t think that it’s going to be easy to classify warfare as low end or high end anymore. It’s going to be a spectrum. The challenge that we have is how do we take what we buy as a Navy and how do we train our people, our Sailors, to operate across the broadest band of that range of conflict? And that’s what I look forward to doing in QDR.
There are going to be some new areas where it will be required for us as a Navy and clearly as a military to spend a bit more time. Littoral areas I believe are going to become increasingly important. We currently have about 70 percent of the world’s population that’s living in about a 100-200 band of the coast around the world. So you have this compression of population down into the littorals. And oftentimes when people talk about the Navy, the littorals seem to be from the shoreline out. I consider the littorals to be the shoreline out and the shoreline in. Anywhere where we can have the reach and of course our reach is becoming greater and greater.
The world of cyber is going to dominate thinking and investment in a significant way over the next few years. Cyber, as many folks would look at it, if you look at the ubiquitous power point slides that have a little lightning bolt going up to the satellites and running around down to earth. That’s not cyber space. Cyber space is on the bottom of the ocean because 95 percent of what moves in cyber space moves on cables that rest on the bottom of the ocean. That’s the maritime domain. That’s the domain of the United States Navy. And the entire undersea area or resources, I believe the resource competition in the future will also drive what we do and where we do it.
I believe that our involvement globally has to continue and the reason for that is our global interests will not wane. And if we have global interests therefore we must be a global Navy and the nation must have a global reach that’s required to influence events and provide to the Commander and Chief options to which he has a basis to move.
The maritime strategy that we issued right about 20 months ago still guides what we do in the Navy. The strategy highlighted six capabilities that will remain at the fore for me, and it’s those six capabilities that as I look at a program or policy or some approach that we’re taking, if it doesn’t support as many of those capabilities as it possibly then I begin to questions if we are on the right path. The capabilities are to remain a forward Navy, remain a deterrent force for the Nation, to be able to provide power projection, that power projection can come off our aircraft carriers, off of our submarines and surface combatants but it also can come out of our amphibious ships in the form of the United States Marines. To be able to provide humanitarian assistance and disaster response and humanitarian assistance can be proactive as well as reactive. And then to provide for maritime security. The foundation for maritime security will be maritime domain awareness knowing what’s moving on, under and above the ocean. How do we as deciosn makers have a view of that and how are we better able to make decisions.