HASC Seapower and Projection Forces Appearance

Chairman Akin

Earlier this afternoon, I appeared on a panel before the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee.  I was invited by Chairman Akin and Ranking Member McIntyre to participate in a closed discussion with members on a variety of subjects attending to Seapower.  As it was a closed session, I cannot go into the details, but I can state that being asked to appear was a personal and professional thrill. Thanks to our Blog-Meister Raymond for allowing me this platform from which to spout off.

Subcommittee staff gave me permission to post my opening remarks, and they are below, as prepared for delivery.  We were given 3-5 mins, and I think this took 2.

Bryan McGrath

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Good afternoon Chairman Akin, Ranking Member McIntyre, and members of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee. My name is Bryan McGrath and I am a Defense Consultant. I spent 21 years on active duty in the Navy, and I retired three years ago. On active duty, I commanded a destroyer and I led the team that wrote current Maritime Strategy entitled ‘A Cooperative Strategy for 21^st Century Seapower’. 

In this opening statement, I would like to make 5 quick points that I hope you will ask me to discuss during the question and answer period.

Point 1:  America is stagnating economically and directionless strategically, as our position of leadership in the world is increasingly challenged.  We have no discernable over-arching Grand Strategy for protecting and furthering our national interests, and we do not have a strategy to maintain world leadership in the face of rising challenges and our own lost initiative.

Point 2:  If we had such a Grand Strategy, it would have as its central component the conservation and renewal of our national power.  The natural, military component of such a grand strategy for a maritime nation would necessarily privilege Seapower, and to some extent, airpower.

Point 3:  Seapower is the most versatile and flexible element of military power in our portfolio, and it is the most efficient and cost effective, yielding powerful benefits in both peacetime and wartime.  No other element of military power can make a similar claim.

Point 4:  We spend a considerable amount on national defense, perhaps too much.  But it is spent inefficiently because it is not spent strategically.  Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have had half a dozen sweeping defense reviews during times of vastly different strategic challenges, yet base defense budgets have remained almost equally split among the three service departments.  Spending scores of billions of dollars to recapitalize the Army so that it can continue to fight counterinsurgencies—where it is always to the advantage of the other side to draw the conflict out—makes little or no sense in the face of the mounting strategic challenge that is our military and security competition with China.   Seapower will be at the center of that competition and Seapower must be more favorably resourced.  

Point 5:  Any re-balancing of priorities from land power to Seapower is unlikely to happen in a Pentagon beholden to the secular religion of Jointness, the paradigm born of the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986.  Jointness values consensus over advocacy and cooperation over competition. Jointness on an operational level has made our fighting forces the envy of the world.  Jointness in acquisition shows great promise in fielding interoperable systems efficiently.  Jointness in doctrine development is a necessary pre-condition for operational excellence.  But Jointness applied to the creation of military strategy prevents hard choices and prioritization - the very elements that comprise strategy. 

Simply put, the Pentagon is incapable of making arguments that might privilege one element of military power over another, irrespective of the strategic sense such a move would make.  It is incapable because the system does not permit such arguments to be raised and taken seriously, and because raising such an argument would be detrimental to the career of any officer seeking to make it, irrespective of rank.  Therefore, I believe that the system for generating coherent military strategy is impoverished and broken.

Thank you for this opportunity and I look forward to your questions.