As Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has traveled around the fleet, he’s gotten recurring sailor questions about ball caps.
“I started getting questions of, ‘Why can’t we wear our ball caps with the ship’s name on them ashore? Or even on the ship, if you’re not standing bridge watches?’ ” Mabus said. “And the first two or three times I got it, I said, ‘You can’t?’ “
Mabus OK’d command ball caps to be worn with the Navy working uniform starting in September, an action he called “the thing that I’ve done that increased morale more than any single thing.”
In a Sept. 30 round-table with reporters in Washington, D.C., Mabus talked about other issues on sailors’ minds, from deployments and retirement to the threats posed by the Islamic State group and the fleet’s outlook. His answers have been edited for brevity. The highlights:
Deployment lengths
Mabus: “Sailors will do whatever they’re asked to do, but more certainty in terms of how long the deployment’s going to be, more of a notion of when the deployment is going to be, is the thing I get asked more than the length of the deployment.
“They’re concerned about predictability in terms of how long they’ll be out, how their families will know. We stopped a carrier — [the Harry S. Truman carrier strike group] — two days before it was supposed to go out two years ago. And some people had rented their apartments. It’s a tough thing to do.”
End strength
Mabus: “We’re growing the fleet. We came down pretty dramatically from 2001 to 2008. We went from 316 ships to 278 ships. And if you count both the active and the reserves, we went down by 90,000 sailors over that time.
“We are right at 324,000 sailors on active-duty — that’s the number that we need, that’s the number that we expect to keep over the next five years. We went through the enlisted retention board and the perform to serve, which was as unpopular as anything I’ve ever seen, and sort of rightfully so. But we had certain ratings that we overmanned and certain that we undermanned.”
Retirement
Mabus: “I get questions about retirement. Will I be able to retire under the system that I joined under? I tell them that Congress has a study going on about that, but part of that study is that whatever decision is made about retirement, whether there’s a change or not … the system you joined under will be the system you retire under.”
Islamic State group
Mabus: “We can stay for as long as we need to stay, based on the normal rotation of our ships. We have a carrier strike group in the region, we have an amphibious ready group in the region, both of which we always have in that region of the world.
“We’re flying strikes off the [aircraft carrier George H.W.] Bush, we’re flying some ISR missions against [the Islamic State group]. [It has cost] less than $100 million for the Navy now. Those are the incremental costs, and it’s mostly weapons. Some gasoline to fly the extra missions — we’re flying more missions than we would have been flying — but it’s mainly the weapons.” [Each of the 47 Tomahawk missiles launched cost just over $1 million.]
Asia rebalance
Mabus: “We will have the first [littoral combat ship] forward-deployed to Singapore this year, followed by three more. About the close of ’16, it will be all four. We’ll be putting some additional ships into Yokosuka, Japan. There will be an additional amphibious ready group in the Pacific; which one hasn’t been decided yet.
“We’re a little over 55 percent of the fleet in the Pacific today. By 2020, we should be right at 60 percent in the Pacific. We’re sending a lot of our new platforms there. Things like the littoral combat ships. The [amphibious assault ship] USS America … will be homeported in San Diego. The P-8s are beginning to arrive in theater in the Pacific first.”
Carrier fleet size
Mabus: “To start with, there’s a law that says we’ve got to have 11 carriers. It’s like gravity: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law. I think [members of] Congress made their intent pretty clear this year in terms of the George Washington, which is the next carrier up to be refueled and have a complex overhaul done.
“They’ve very specifically said that the only work that could be done with the money that they allocated was work to do the refueling. The Navy wants the GW. We need 11 [carriers] to get them into a more regular cycle of maintenance and training. We have 10 right now, with a waiver from Congress, because we just retired Enterprise.”
Next-gen ballistic-missile subs
Mabus: “One of the things that the[chief of naval operations] and I have both been saying is not that we can’t recapitalize [ballistic missile submarines], but if we do, we’re going to break something else. The boomers are the most survivable leg of that triad. This a national mission, this is a national program. We’ve got to have this debate now about how we pay for this, because we’re not waiting.
“We’re spending several billion dollars over this 5-year period doing the science and technology, doing the research and development, doing initial designs. I think we’ve been pretty clear about what the impacts of this are going to be, and also that we can’t wait until ’21, which is when we start building the first of these, to have this debate.”
