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You are responsible for the shipbuilding and acquisition programs of the U.S. Navy. Advances
in technology have become the basis for many of our newest platforms, to include LCS and
unmanned systems. Given that these platforms require less people, are we moving toward
a smaller force more dependent on systems rather than manpower? Are platforms becoming
more important than people?
Well the short answer is absolutely not. The main thing that we have going for us in the
Navy and Marine Corps and our, and it's not so secret a weapon, but our biggest weapon
system and our most critical one is our people. We ask an enormous amount of our people to
man these incredibly complex, incredibly advanced platforms that you talked about. To do that,
they have to be the best trained, they have to be the best educated, they have to be the
most dedicated force that we've ever had and that's exactly what we've got. Nobody else
pushes responsibility down as early and as low as we do. We expect every Sailor, we expect
every Marine, to be great at his or her job and we expect it every single day and we get
it every single day. When discussing platforms, which is one of
your four key priorities for the Department of the Navy, you often speak of your goal
of reaching a 300 ship navy by 2019. Why is this important to achieve and how difficult
will it be to accomplish given the current fiscal environment?
It is important to achieve because... I'll give you a few quick numbers -- 9/11 2001,
U.S. Navy was at 316 ships. By 2008, after one of the great military buildups in American
history, our fleet had declined to 278 ships. In the four years before I took office, the
U.S. Navy put 19 ships under contract, that wasn't enough to stop the decline of the fleet,
that wasn't enough to protect the industrial base, it wasn't enough to do the things we
need to do. Since I've taken office, in the last four years, we have put 60 ships under
contract with no increase in the top line budget, in fact, a decrease in the top line
budget for the Navy. Quantity becomes a quality all its own. We have to have enough of the
right kind of ships to perform our missions, to perform them worldwide and not just be
in the right place at the right time, but to be in the right place all the time. That's
what we give the nation -- presence. We are there, we are forward deployed, and we are
America's away team. If we keep having sequestration, if we keep having these continuing resolutions
- and congress has never passed a budget on time in the four years I've been in office,
and there hasn't been a budget on time since 2005 - if we keep operating in this way, it
becomes increasingly difficult to build these ships, to build these aircraft, to do the
things we need to do. We will begin to do things like break multi-year contracts, which
save us an enormous amount of money, by building not just one ship a year, but 10 ships over
five years. You save big amounts of money by being able to order in quantity and things
like that. We're putting at risk not only the growth of the fleet, but the ability to
do our duty, the ability to give the president options. The ability to be the flexible response
the country has to have. That is what is at risk here. That's not to argue that we shouldn't
spend less on defense. We are coming out of two land wars. The American people have a
right to expect that we will spend less on defense, but we shouldn't do it in this mindless
way. We shouldn't do it in this way that does not put money against strategy. We should
do it in a smart, very targeted way to get rid of programs or things that we just don't
need or that are inefficient or something like that. We shouldn't do this one size fits
all, cut everything, because it is just not a smart way to cut and it will begin to impact
our readiness, training, and on the things that we need to do, to do our job that the
country expects from us.