The F-47, Golden Dome, and other defense plans are great. They are arguably needed. But these lustrous initiatives stand in stark contrast to the lurking reality that has Congressional members arguing pointlessly in stale conference rooms: the defense budget, along with the debt service, is bankrupting us.
Countless lists and inventories come along, reminding us of obscene costs and even waste. It’s one of America’s oldest dilemmas: we justify nearly any expense toward the imperative of defending ourselves, while the unchecked costs drive us each year toward a pauper’s grave. All of this civilian and Congressional kvetching and handwringing are for naught unless someone with the right authority and inclination can come in and do something about it. With the new Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, we might have our man.
Defense Secretary Hegseth has defined the mission of his DoD as “lethality and readiness,” which has so far proved out to mean stronger soldiers, and weapon superiority. Navy Secretary Phelan has in turn applied a novel definition of “readiness” within his domain: financial discipline. He is pointing to a reality as true for the largest department in the world as it is for your checkbook: fiscal irresponsibility is ruin, especially if all the money is sunk into things that don’t work. (RELATED: VANESSA BATTAGLIA: We Must Catch Up To China In The Drone Arms Race)
The Navy hosts a disproportionate share of the DoD’s cost woes, as the procurement authority of two of the most troubled programs under recent development: the Constellation-class frigate, which was subjected to the classic engineering trap of interoperability with European ships; and the F-35 Lightning II, a multi-national “you help build it” customer-partner program that is hard to maintain. Notice a theme?
So it’s both intriguing and unsurprising that President Trump appointed a total outsider from the commercial domain to take charge of the Navy. Sworn in on March 25, Secretary Phelan has already flown around the world, poking around the insides of barracks and shipyards and interviewing the unheard masses; returning in time to present the House Appropriations Committee with a pile of receipts that left its members quoting him real-time in follow-up questions.
Phelan’s approach: to rein in costs by re-building and modernizing the defense industrial base, while eliminating programmatic waste and re-structuring contract incentives. In other words, making defense operate like a business.
Phelan knows what a barracks should cost, because he’s built hotels. He observed that some Naval barracks cost more per room than Hawaiian luxury suites lined in marble. Such price tags are not likely to last long.
He’s making the connection between offshoring and readiness. “The industrial base has been hollowed out. We’ve lost manufacturing and our ability to manufacture,” he noted of our country’s generational self-betrayal, in response to a bean-counting question about delivering on-time and on-budget from the House Appropriations Committee.
But perhaps most importantly, he’s talking to defense industrial base workers. And comparing their feedback to that of the company’s executives – which, he noted is “completely the opposite.” Finally, someone sees through the C-suite nonsense.
Of the fifty-six thousand acquisition personnel currently employed by the Navy – an unsolicited statistic he brought up – Phelan noted “Something’s off. What are all these people doing?” In response to a line of Congressional questioning baiting him to repeat Biden-era scapegoat excuses such as “supply chains,” Phelan asymmetrically said “I’m tired of the covid excuse.” Kaboom!
The man is an unfiltered decoder ring for all the baloney that has plagued the defense sector and the industrial base. Everything Secretary Phelan says is good for the Navy is also, incidentally, good for our country. He might actually fix acquisition in the Navy, and in turn, the DoD.
Vanessa Battaglia is a defense engineer with 14 years’ experience designing software, hardware, and airborne systems for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Special Operations Command, and the Federal Aviation Administration. She spent most of her time in the defense world at Raytheon, and lately writes for The Federalist and Human Events as well.
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