A day after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a speech from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, congratulating the crew on proving doubters wrong, the Navy’s No. 2 officer sounded a warning note, saying the full readiness impact of a deployment double extension and other combat commitments had yet to be felt.
Speaking at a hearing before the congressionally created National Commission on the Future of the Navy on Thursday, Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby said the Navy faced difficulties that weren’t all immediately visible when it came to sustaining and resetting after such combat demands.
“That’s the piece I think that we need to be better at articulating and demonstrating — what the cost of this extension will be two years from now,” Kilby said. “So people see that, and they sign that bill.”
Referencing Hegseth’s commendation of sailors on the Lincoln for their successful 321-day deployment, of which they spent 265 consecutive days without a port call, Kilby acknowledged that the crew had “delivered the goods.”
“So, it’s a little bit of a challenge for me to say you can’t do this when we keep delivering,” he said.
But, he said, readiness rates remain “artificially high” amid the combat surge because ships remain deployed or have yet to return to maintenance. When that happens, Kilby indicated, the “little bit of a false positive” readiness picture will change rapidly.
“The problem will come when eventually they do come home. The industrial base will not be able to swallow that pill, and so we’ll have to sequence that,” he said.
A standard solution to account for the additional cost: deferring maintenance.
“I’ll either squish the package into the bare minimum and not do modernization things I need to do, so that’s the bill that’s being paid there,” Kilby said.
Unmanned vessels, he added, present a promising future solution, but still one that’s a way off.
“When we get a combatant commander that’s willing to ask for a tailored force package, think a [littoral combat ship], an unmanned air vessel, and some unmanned surface vessels to do monitoring and maritime domain awareness and potentially action, it alleviates the request for him to ask for a strike group or an amphibious ready group. That will help,” Kilby said. “But that’s a long time coming because they don’t see that offer on the menu right now. We’ve got to act on that and produce that thing for them to ask for it.”
He suggested that a cultural change to give service leaders and key commanders more flexibility in how they meet requirements would help to sustain long-term readiness.
“They have very, very little flexibility in their basic phase to get through those gates, and we’re pressurizing that by saying, ‘Do it faster, so I can count you as combat-surge ready,’” Kilby said, “which prevents them from maybe doing some things that existed in what I maybe fondly remember from my youth, where we had a little bit more control of that culture.”
For now, Kilby said, the Navy is “in a system” where the geographic combatant commander is given a problem to address and will ask for whatever they need from the services to meet the requirement. The services, in turn, will do whatever it takes to meet the requirement, despite future costs.
“I think it’s a tough pill for us to swallow, because the Navy’s strength, the Navy and Marine Corps’ strength, is our weakness in that regard,” he said.
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