This is CNA Talks, episode 146. I'm John Stimson with CNA's Office of Communications. Strategic competition is about more than military might. Competition below the threshold of armed conflict is equally important. In this episode, we discuss the U.S. Navy's expanding role in strategic competition with the People's Republic of China and what investments are necessary for it to succeed. ♪
The fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act added new language on the responsibilities of the Department of the Navy. In addition to its mission of preparing the Naval service for conflict, the Department of the Navy is now charged with organizing, training, and equipping forces, quote, "for the peaceful promotion of the national security interest and prosperity of the United States."
CNA recently put together a report entitled "The Department of the Navy and Strategic Competition with the People's Republic of China." This report spans the FFRDC, including analysts with expertise in all manner of different fields. With me today are three of those analysts. First, David Finkelstein, who is the Vice President and Director of CNA's China and Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Division.
A retired U.S. Army officer, he held significant China-related positions at the Pentagon as an advisor to the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was also the project lead on this report. David, thanks so much for coming on today.
Great to be here. Thanks. Next, Gordon Jaquess, who is the Vice President and Director of CNA's Systems, Tactics, and Force Development Division. He formerly served as the Director of the Naval Force Division at the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office with the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Gordon, it's great to have you on. Hey, happy to be here. Thanks. And finally, we have Anne Parcell, who is the director of CNA's Naval Human Resources Program. Anne, it's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. This report was a big effort by a lot of different people, and I'm really excited to talk about it. But I want to make sure we get the context out of the way first. So, David, what was the genesis of this project? How did that come about?
The fiscal year of 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, as you mentioned earlier in your introductory remarks, levied upon the Navy new requirements in law to not just be able to conduct warfighting at the high end of the spectrum, which is one of its traditional missions, but also to secure the peacetime interests of the United States below the threshold of conflict.
And so the office of the Secretary of the Navy came to CNA and asked us if we could apply the considerable talent across the FFRDC
to help think in very large terms what does that really mean with respect to the larger strategic competition that is taking place between the United States and the People's Republic of China? What does it mean specifically for the Navy and how should the Navy better position itself to compete in this new type of situation? And so in many ways,
This report played to the strengths of the FFRDC, the Center for Naval Analyses, because, of course, we've been doing this for the Navy since 1942. So it was a natural leap to ask us to do this. By way of context, this paper is much more about the United States Navy and what it needs to do than about the People's Republic of China, although we can talk about the People's Republic of China later on. This is really about
the tough choices that the Navy is going to have to make, and Gordon will get into some of that later on, as it retools itself or rethinks how it's going to better position itself. Got it. And, you know, we're in a little bit of a coming out of the, you know, the era of the global war on terror and into this time of strategic competition. You know, the Navy's role is very different than it has been for the last 15, 20 years. So,
It's natural that you would have the need for this kind of analysis during such a transitionary time, I think. But yeah, I did want to ask you, you know, with that context out of the way, what's the number one thing you want listeners to take away from this report? So I would say, John, that the NDA itself, it codifies and reinforces what Navy does on a day-to-day basis.
But importantly, and what we explore in detail in the report is that it brings to the forefront questions about how a Navy that currently is and rightfully is designed to fight and win must become equally adept at peacetime competition. That's the big takeaway. We're going to talk through some of the near-term recommendations we provide, which was a key part of the tasking. But at the big picture, one thing I think is important for people to take away
is that a future fleet that mirrors the current fleet is not going to meet the Navy's needs either above or below the threshold of a conflict.
Right. And that kind of gets at what David was saying about the hard choices that need to be made. But let's get into the specifics because that'll allow us to cover a lot of this stuff. So your report is broken down into three sections, strengthening maritime dominance, building a culture of war fighting excellence and enhancing strategic partnerships. So let's take these one at a time and we'll start with strengthening maritime dominance. Gordon, why is this important and what are some of your key recommendations here?
Sure. Thanks, John. So first off, I think important to note that we selected these three categories in large part because they are an organizing function of enduring priorities that Secretary of the Navy Del Toro has talked about at length. So we organized ourselves around those three.
So strengthening maritime dominance. What we're talking about here is really what I mentioned at the beginning, which is this idea that a future fleet that looks like the current fleet is not going to be sufficient either above the high end threshold of conflict or below because of its over reliance on a low number of a few capital ships.
So really a fleet that's designed to both engage in protracted competition and also to prepare to fight and win has to be larger, more distributed, more lethal, and better able to operate across the globe. So we use strengthening maritime dominance as an organizing principle to discuss a few key takeaways in that section. Other five of them are only going to hit on a few. The first one
is about enhancing surface ship reach lethality and survivability. What we mean here is there's a recognition that it is unlikely, verging on impossible, that the U.S. Navy will be able to outcapacity the People's Republic of China in the Western Pacific.
As such, there is a priority for every ship to be able to see and touch and affect as much of the maritime environment as possible. So we bucketed recommendations there in things such as additional organic intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting for surface ships, or a suite of munitions investments, again, recognizing that each individual unit
needs to have as many enablers as possible so that I can reach out further. That's section one. Section two is about operationalizing and scaling the unmanned future.
So importantly here, there's been a lot of talk, a lot of discussion about leveraging the capabilities and capacities that unmanned technologies can provide. So what we're really talking about here is transitioning missions that are traditionally done with manned assets and to push those missions on the unmanned assets for a variety of reasons.
One can be because unmanned assets can go where manned assets can't because of threat environments. And two, in many cases, they are a much cheaper option. So in this case, it would be thinking about things like commercial off the shelf options that like that, which is being done in Task Force 59 to reduce
leverage commercial technology to provide maritime domain awareness in a much cheaper way. Another big piece of the unmanned situation in the option space is to ensure that we have the appropriate, what's known as dot mil PF underpinning. This idea that investing in technology is necessary but not sufficient. And what we really need to do is ensure bedrock analyses and investments are made such that when the technology matures, the systems can be bought in sufficient quantity
and operationalized at the scale and pace of relevance.
Two last ones I'll mention very briefly. One is about colloquially referred to as running up the score undersea. This one is about recognizing that our key strength is in undersea dominance and something we should not rest on our laurels and ensure that we can maintain it. A big priority here is on the submarine industrial base, which is having some serious issues. Last one I'll leave you with here is about the need to act now to realize strategic change.
The idea here is the Department of the Navy and the Department of Defense writ large are massive organizations. And the timelines involved in resource decisions suggest that near-term recommendations today may not have impact for multiple years, but that's no reason to delay. So you need to commit to and fund that future fleet that we talked about in broad strokes at the beginning, while also working with colleagues in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the Hill to
on different adoption pathways for investment. That deliberative is good for massive multi-billion dollar acquisition programs, but there has to be ways to move quicker in decision-making processes for cheaper, lower dollar, lower threshold, higher tech capabilities so that we can field them much quicker.
Following up on the point about drones and using commercial drones, we've seen in Ukraine how useful these widely available commercial drones are as a military tool for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. So I do think it's important to consider the value that these very available systems bring to the table and not get caught up in everything needing to be the most advanced, most expensive piece of technology. Yeah.
I think that's fair. I mean, certainly the maritime domain is much more complicated. You know, there is a reason why unmanned aerial vehicles are more mature than their surface and undersea counterparts. And that's because the environment in which they operate is much easier. There's a lot of space in the air. Undersea domain is extremely complicated. And the surface of the ocean itself also with sea states makes it much more difficult. That said, you are right that there are commercial firms that are doing great things.
And no, it's not a replacement for an Arleigh Burke class destroyer. But what it can do is it can transition some small, low-end missions off of our very low-density, highly needed capabilities that we have. Well, then let's talk about building a culture of warfighting excellence. And Anne, we'll go to you on this one. Can you talk a little bit about this bucket and why it's important and some of your key recommendations here?
Yeah, absolutely. So Gordon laid out a couple of different broad brush ways that the force could be organized, you know, moving away from a few smaller capital ship type, you know, force profiles or force postures to perhaps those that are more distributed, smaller, more unmanned. But all of that still requires people, namely sailors and officers, to be more organized.
being in the loop, if not on the platforms, operating and maintaining them, certainly from doing that from afar. That in turn requires that we have that good, steady, regular flow of recruits coming into the Navy that can be trained up on all these platforms and systems and effectively how to prosecute whatever level of mission,
you know, war fighting depth, if you will, that's required of the situation. And right now, it's certainly not news to most folks who watch the news is that all the services, Navy very much included, have really struggled with
recruiting these last couple of years. So Navy's taken a number of steps to get recruiting resources back to where they were previously. There had been some decrements to some of the resources that were put toward recruiting more recently. And
You take a risk when you do that. And we cannot predict when the economy is going to be particularly strong, for example, and that almost always complicates recruiting. So one of our key recommendations is to continue putting resources back in to recruiting so that we can recruit the force we need and then continue.
The second key takeaway on the recruiting recommendations is that you really need to build in the consistency in making sure those recruiting resources are there all the time. The reason is, is because it's really tempting to cut recruiting resources when recruiting does appear to be easier. For example, when the economy isn't as strong. But the problem is you can cut quickly, but it takes quite a while to rebuild resources.
the effectiveness of a recruiting apparatus, you need to know the communities you're recruiting in and so forth. You just can't take your eye off of that because people have to remember the workforce for the Navy, in uniform at least, is a
basically a closed labor force. You bring them in at junior most levels, you train them up, some of them retain, and you build your experience profile that way. We don't get to bring in people laterally, hire the mid-level manager in uniform. It doesn't really work that way. So that's why recruiting is so crucial that we not have any serious gaps, any serious shortfalls.
And that brings us to retention, which is sort of the flip side of recruiting. Once you have them in,
You need to keep a sufficient number of sailors and officers in to ensure that you've got the seniority and experience and oversight and leadership in the uniform force. That's required, again, of whatever mission is asked of them. And we have a pretty good idea over the years of how we can use cash bonuses, basically monetary incentives, to keep folks in by placing those bonuses at key places in their careers.
in these sailors and officers decision-making space. So that's all well and good, but we're really seeing the need for leveraging different kinds of recruiting incentives. And some of those are non-monetary, things like having some sort of choice on where you're going to be assigned next, or whether you have on or off base housing and so forth. Again, the Navy has some of this in place, but
we're suggesting that more of that is probably going to have to be done going forward. Child care, for example, is a huge issue. And how do we crack that nut? That's probably affecting people's retention decisions. And then lastly, you may recruit and retain well. You need them trained up well. You need this force trained up well. And we have two key recommendations on that. There's more detailed recommendations in the report itself. The top two are
are probably that there needs to be an assessment done of current professional military education institutions and programs. This is done periodically. But in this case, we're really talking about with regard to everything about the People's Republic of China and its armed forces and so forth. That knowledge needs to be current, it needs to be accurate, and it needs to really proliferate through the leadership ranks and even below. And that
brings us to our second recommendation in the training space, which is not everybody in the Navy needs to know everything all the time about China and the types of missions that revolve around meeting the challenges that they pose. But we can develop learning modules that would be accurate, that would be
timely, that would be available maybe in one or two spots virtually, that any Department of Navy personnel in uniform or out could access just to ensure that some basic common knowledge, again, that's accurate and kept up to date, is available.
And that just makes us more knowledgeable force. And it helps people understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. David, I did want to give you a chance here to follow up on the point about knowing the PRC and like, you know, knowledge within the Navy of their military.
Yeah, I think Anne couched it quite well, that there's this idea that throughout the force, whether it's the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, all of the services, there ought to be some fundamental understanding of the People's Republic of China and the military services of China. If this is, in fact, a long-term competition that we are engaged in, and most people tend to think that it is.
So the idea is that this learning, of course, the U.S. government knows a lot about these things, but
usually at highly classified levels. This information is not accessible down to the deck plates. You know, I went into the army in the 1970s during the height of the Cold War, and back then, I mean, every sergeant and every lieutenant knew something about the Soviet military forces. Now, having said that, I do not mean to imply for one microsecond that this is a Cold War with China like we had with the Soviet Union. That is not the case.
for a variety of reasons we could spend a separate podcast on. But the point is that if we are in this competition, if we are going to be looking to either engage or compete with the PRC and our military counterparts there, then we ought to know a little bit something about them and not rely on information that may not be as viable as other sources you might get.
But this also brings us to the idea of the partnerships part, which is the third leg of the tripod of this project. And if people have a chance to read the product, and I think it'll be online soon, they'll get a sense for some of the challenges that the Department of the Navy is up against today.
challenges externally because of some of the pressures posed by China, which is now a maritime power. And we should address that maybe if we have a chance later on, but also systemic issues within the Navy itself.
and within our American workforce, which makes this difficult. In other words, the United States Navy, the Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy writ large is not going to be able to succeed in a long-term strategic competition with the PRC below the threshold of conflict on its own. It's going to need partners. It's going to need a lot of other people to work with it, to support it, and to
have the Navy supporting. So, for example, we take a look at industry right here in the United States as one critical partner that the Navy needs to deal with. And I know Secretary Del Toro is very conscious of this. He's made a lot of trips to the various shipyards. He's talking to the labor forces.
But I think we all recognize that there's a shortage of shipyards in the United States. We don't have the capacity we used to to build ships. We don't have the capacity that we used to to repair ships. And even on the non-military side, our merchant marine has shrunk exponentially over the years. China is a rising maritime power with a capital M, not just naval, but commercial. The United States, unfortunately,
is a stressed maritime power, if not a receding maritime power. And the American people really got a taste of what it means not to have a big commercial fleet during the height of the pandemic, when the shelves of Walmart and Target and Costco were all bare all of a sudden because of bottlenecks in ports, because of a lack of containers, because there were no shore-to-ship cranes to unload supplies.
Our cargo. And so we've got we've got a commercial civilian maritime stress going on here that this report talks to in a little bit more detail than I'm going to speak to right now. But we wanted to bring that up also. But we also we also need our partners in industry to be with us in protecting technology.
We just cannot afford to be losing the proprietary information, the intellectual property, and the critical high-tech assets that the Department of the Navy and the Department of Defense and the United States government is investing in to give us those technological edges. We can't afford to have them lost.
Because we don't have enough protections in place. So in the report, we have a few recommendations. I won't go over them now for how the U.S. Navy, the Department of the Navy, can work better with industry in order to protect.
protect our technological advantages. Okay, so the other part of partnerships is, of course, with our allies and partners. And if there would be three words to describe the entire foreign policy under this current administration, it would be
allies and partners. And I think that's true across the board. And it's true for the United States Navy as well. And clearly, the United States Navy is doing a terrific job in deepening its alliances and partnerships, raising the level of operational capabilities that our key partners, especially in the Indo-Pacific, are able to meet us with. We're doing some great jobs there. But one of the things we found in the report is that
We may not have enough officers, NCOs, chief petty officers enlisted, or a facile with working with allies and partners. You just don't show up and throw yourself into a different culture and expect operational magic.
So we talk about taking a look at the foreign area officer program that the Navy has been building over many, many years to its credit. We talk about finding ways for line officers, general line officers, to get more foreign immersion experiences. And we also talk about
engaging in what we call the battle for the narrative. So this competition is not just being waged by gray holes with weapons systems. Even as we sit here today, there are non-kinetic ways that this competition is going on. For example, there is today a propaganda war, an information war, a battle for the narrative that's going on between the US and the PRC as to the efficacy of their forces,
the efficacy of their policies and what it means for other countries in the world. So the chief information officers, the public affairs officers of the Department of the Navy, the office of the JAG, who has to be involved in maritime law issues, all of these things are discussed in this report. So I'll just leave it there for the moment.
I think that, you know, and you capture this really well, the breadth of what you've covered here and like elements like thinking about our, you know, public private partnerships and, you know, working with allies to develop their capabilities and putting all of that in the lens, in this lens of strategic competition. I think it's really easy to see this stuff entirely from a military perspective and think about these things in those stark terms. But those other issues that you've brought up here are really,
also incredibly important and make a big difference. So I just wanted to thank you for highlighting those. Bringing this all together, how should we be thinking about future competition with China overall? We actually had to confront that question when we were putting this together.
reading a lot of what other people had been doing and looking at a very large body of analysis within the Center for Naval Analysis itself. We didn't just come to this subject here with this project. We've been working these issues for decades, frankly. But really, at the highest level of strategic discourse,
One way to think about this competition is that it is a systemic rivalry. It's about contending institutions, about conflicting processes, about values and governance philosophies. It's about pursuing national interests by seeking influence, advantage, and leverage in the international system
to secure national strategic ends. And what this paper tends to focus on is the maritime dimensions of that larger strategic competition. Again, that there is a maritime component,
The national security strategy and national defense strategies that the government put out touch on this, but it didn't really flesh out what that maritime dimension of the competition is all about. And the aspiration of this project was that
We've done that, but also laid out, not just described what the problem is, but with the great analysis of Gordon and his people and Anne and her people, we've laid out some recommendations for how the Navy can better position itself to deal with these maritime issues. One thing that I would like to highlight is
As we are working through, as I mentioned earlier, the NDA language codifies and reinforces what the Navy does on a day-to-day basis. All naval services, including the Marine Corps.
The issue that we were struggling with here or that we dug into and explored in great detail was the intent behind the NDAA language, or really, to put it more precisely, what is going to come from it. Now, it is absolutely an added focus on what Don does day to day. So the question there is, does this added focus mean that additional resources are going to come from
towards that? Or does it mean that it's additional focus that must occur within current top lines? And that's a fundamental and important question to answer, one that is beyond the scope of this paper, nor one that CNA is able to answer.
What we tried to highlight was if you want to enhance your focus on strategic competition with the People's Republic of China below the threshold of conflict from what the Navy and the Marine Corps can do, that's we focus near term recommendations of what they can do. You have two choices. One is to make incremental small changes or two, you make a fundamental added shift.
If you're going to make this fundamental shift, you're going to invest in some of the things we laid out here. The nation needs to either make a massive national level investment or hard choices are going to be required.
We tried to lay out some of those. The biggest one, the most one that would be potentially contentious, but we thought important to highlight is something like reassessing the size and the shape and the capabilities of the carrier force, right? It's a perfect example of something that absolutely provides value today and will be needed into the future. However, with the investments, they are really focused on the high-end fight. So if
recognizing that things that are under discussion, such as multi-ship procurement, do save some resources. However, that locks in investments for the life of that carrier and the procurements. You're making a bet on what the future of 60 years is going to look like.
So you are locking yourself in to not reap any benefits from making a different choice, having a smaller carrier fleet because of uncertainty about its future effectiveness. And so what we talk about here is that is absolutely an option to be explored if hard choices are required and no additional resources are provided. We do not want this paper simply to be a laundry list of things that could be invested upon without exploring, well, how are you going to make that happen?
Just to quickly clarify for listeners who might not be familiar, Don refers to the Department of the Navy.
That's correct. So the Navy and Marine Corps team. All right. Well, the report is the Department of the Navy and Strategic Competition with the People's Republic of China. That report will be coming soon. So if you're not already following CNA on our social media pages, be sure to do that. There'll be links to all of our profiles in the show nets. And David and Gordon, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed talking to all of you. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Take care.
And I want to thank you all so much for listening and we'll see you next time on CNA Talks. Thanks for listening to CNA Talks. The views expressed are those of the commentators and do not necessarily reflect those of CNA or any of its sponsors. CNA Talks is produced, edited, and mixed by John Stimson. Our theme music is by Edward Granga. If you enjoy our show,
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