CNO Remarks to Submarine Industrial Base Council - As Prepared

Good evening, everyone and welcome.

Senator Banks, members of the Submarine Industrial Base Council, veterans, industry partners, vendors, and friends it is an honor to stand before such a critical group of leaders.

Before I begin, I'd like to express my thanks for what you do.

Without this passionate group of Americans, our Navy would never leave the pier our submarines could not submerge below the waves, and our nation would surely be less secure from strategic attack.

Ladies and gentlemen, we should all be rightfully proud of our Navy but even more important, our Sailors and how they have performed so bravely and professionally during Operation EPIC FURY.
They are truly our Nation's best enabled by and supported by you, our hard-working industrial base partners at home.

And what a great event this is, bringing together the brightest minds who make American sea power real - welders and engineers, CEOs and artisans, primes and suppliers, innovators and disruptors.

You are the Foundry behind the Fleet the ones who are charged with not only delivering the Navy the nation needs, but the Navy our country deserves.
To the Submarine Industrial Base Council, thank you for organizing this event.

Your mission - preserving the strength the U.S. submarine force and promoting the vitality of a strong and resilient industrial base - could not be more important to our national defense.

Last month, I released our Navy's newest strategic guidance - the United States Navy Fighting Instructions.

If you haven't read it, I encourage you to do so.
In its simplest form, the U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions provide a conceptual framework for modern warfare delivering homeland defense, sustaining our global network of deterrence, and preserving our national prosperity.

It is our overarching guidance that outlines which investments matter most, the asymmetric capabilities we need to forge, and the requisite levels of technical mastery that will enable our Sailors to fight and win across the spectrum of conflict.

Underpinned by my priorities of the Foundry, the Fleet, and the way we Fight the United States Navy Fighting Instructions chart a course for the future of our all-domain fleet.

As such, tonight I'd like to share with you how this critical community can bring the U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions to bear.

It's not lost on me that this community stems from what President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the "Arsenal of Democracy."

The same arsenal that enabled our forces to fight across two oceans during World War II.

And, the same industrial base that repaired one of our most decorated aircraft carriers, the USS Yorktown, after the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Battle worn and torn, when Yorktown limped back to Pearl Harbor in May of 1942, engineers estimated months of repair but with the Imperial Japanese Fleet steaming towards Midway, time was not a luxury we could spare.

Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz was among the first to inspect the damage. After surveying her twisted metal and torpedo laden scars, he turned to a nearby technician and commanded a simple order: "We must have this ship back in three days."
The reply he heard was just as simple: "Yes, sir."

With that, the Arsenal of Democracy roared into life.

Fourteen hundred workers flooded the pier.
Around the clock they measured, cut, and welded massive plates of steel over the gaping wounds in Yorktown's hull.

Sparks flew throughout the night. The rhythm of hammers and torches echoed across the harbor. What had been estimated to take months of repair was accomplished in a mere number of days 72 hours to be precise.

That didn't happen by accident. It happened because America was ready. We were focused. The infrastructure was in place. The supply chains were primed. The workforce was trained. And industry competed hard - and collaborated even harder.

Achieving this imperative wasn't optional, it was existential for survival.

On the third day, Yorktown shoved off for Midway, welders still finishing their work as she slipped past the harbors edge - tenders guiding her until they could no longer keep pace.

By the end of the war, in just five years, American shipyards had not only repaired and refitted a battle-worn Fleet they had forged an entirely new Navy more than 140 aircraft carriers, 8 battleships, 807 cruisers and destroyers and over 200 submarines.

That was the Arsenal of Democracy at work.
That was American industry operating at flank speed. Driven, dedicated, and determined to win.
And that, was the Navy's foundry forging our victory.

That story means something. It's illustrative to how I view the world. Since taking office in September, my slogan has been "Built in the Foundry, Tempered by the Fleet, and Forged to Fight".

My priorities of Foundry, Fleet, and Fight are not just words but a framework for action forging our total workforce in the Foundry ensuring the Fleet is properly prepared and most importantly, ensuring our forces are ready to Fight.

They expound upon Secretary Phelan's priorities his number one of which being "a renaissance of shipbuilding" and emphasize the need to view everything we do through an operational lens.

Every investment we make, every policy we produce, and every strategy we employ begins in the Foundry.

It is the bedrock of our Navy and is comprised of three enduring pillars:

First, People our total workforce of Sailors, civilians, artisans and engineers.
Second, Materiel steel, munitions, raw earth materials, semiconductors, warheads, and heavy lift machinery.

And third, Infrastructure our American-made facilities, installations, dry-docks, and piers where the fires of the foundry are passionately stoked.

Every ounce of combat power we wield begins here.

And you, our industrial base partners, are the lifeblood of that Foundry.

But for too long, the Foundry has been the bill payer of our Fleet.

We mortgaged our long-term readiness for near-term operations. Optimized our supply chains for peacetime efficiency prioritizing a "just-in-time" model that's ill-suited for the "just-in-case" reality.
We deferred years of maintenance and investments reducing our shipyards, munitions factories, and installations to hollow shells of their once great capacity and scale.

As such, the resultant has been nothing short of an accumulation of risk along a decay curve that has been hidden from view by "get 'er done" leaders for decades.

When I joined the Navy over forty years ago, our industrial base was producing five to seven submarines per year both Los Angeles and Ohio-class submarines.

Today, we are delivering at a rate of 1.2 when the minimum should be at least 2.3.

Let that sink in. It should be unsettling to all of us in the room.

While we try to soften that number by talking about tons of submarine delivered we don't deploy by ton we deploy by a full up round unit of force.

Let me be clear, I'm not pointing fingers what I am doing is pointing forward. Because for me, industry isn't just a vendor, you're a strategic partner and partnership cuts both ways.

No one here is singularly responsible for our current state of affairs, but together we are accountable for learning, improving, and executing at pace. Each of us holds ownership in that goal.

For the Navy, what we owe industry is a clear demand signal with stable budgets that are signed into law on time. Clear priorities, consistent requirements, and timely decisions because delays and indecision or more simply said, doing nothing inserts high risk too.

Look at where we are in time. Between Virginia Class VPM Block V, Columbia, and AUKUS our nation's demand signal is clear: America needs more submarines. Certainly, the National Defense Strategy recognizes that need.
It's incumbent on us to deliver.

I fully acknowledge that these challenges aren't easy to solve. We're not just building aircraft or ships we're building multi-billion dollar submarines with extraordinary complexity and sophistication.

Submarines designed to withstand thousands of pounds of force across the hull in silence, undetected, while carrying the weight of our nation's security imperatives.

Our challenges are not undefined, but they are deep-rooted, complex, and systemic. Further, we did not accumulate these challenges overnight and we won't get back "on plane" of production without a Herculean level of teamwork, focus, and across the board improvement.

Whether it's workforce gaps, retention challenges, and supply chain fragility or infrastructure strain and sole-source choke points all of these issues will take time to correct with enduring solutions.

I am eyes wide open when I say that the United States Navy and Submarine Industrial Base must operate now on a wartime footing.

A wartime footing means combat effectiveness over comfort, speed over bureaucratic perfection, a strong and resilient supply chain that can deliver on demand, and prudent risk calculations today to avoid catastrophic risk later.

It means leaders at every level are empowered-and expected-to act with initiative, creativity, and urgency.

Because deterrence only works if it's credible and that credibility originates in the Foundry.

While this may not be the lighthearted speech you were expecting, it's the hard-hitting truth.
But all is not lost the indications are clear.

For the first time in my life, shipbuilding is being placed on a national pedestal.

Significant funding backed by the executive branch and direct foreign investments are breathing life back into the Foundry.

Shipyard wages are slowly starting to rise.
Workforce initiatives like the Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing, or ATDM, are placing highly skilled artisans back into the yards.
And, momentum across the industrial base is building.

I strongly believe that a rising ride lifts all boats and events like tonight signal to me that the tides are starting to shift.

Our Nation is waking up to the reality that a lethal and formidable Navy, enabled by a strong and resilient industrial base, is our Nation's surest guarantee of peace.

So, my charge for you tonight is this ruthlessly challenge the status quo. Challenge our paradigms and our underlying assumptions.

Funding alone doesn't solve culture; it requires a willingness to embrace collaborative partnerships where competition drives speed and spurs innovation.

When it's all said and done, we either win as an effective warfighting ecosystem or not at all.

To our primes and traditional vendors the companies that have carried this mission for decades on end our Navy remains grateful for your service.

But we need to diversify our portfolio welcoming in non-traditional vendors and new marketplace entrants: advanced manufacturers, tech start-ups, organizations that embrace new additive and subtractive manufacturing processes, AI-enabled logistics, more robotics and autonomous innovators and commercial disruptors who have never built a single component for a submarine but know how to solve hard problems.

The margin for error is shrinking and too little too late isn't good enough. We can't afford to be narrow-minded in our processes or slow to adopt change.

That means broadening our supply shelves, reducing single points of failure, improving reliability, and creating pathways for small businesses to punch higher than their weight class and break into the industrial base sphere.

This is not about replacing anyone; it's about strengthening and empowering everyone.

As I begin to close, let me end with this.

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover once said and I quote: "The great end of life is not knowledge, but action."

Action is the standard. Action in workforce development. Action in expanding supplier networks. Action in modernizing facilities. Action in eliminating bottlenecks. And action in challenging old assumptions.

There will come a day when our sons and daughters submerge below the waves, a new generation of apex predators, in submarines forged by your hands and built by your intellectual thought.

They will trail our adversaries, they will underwrite our strategic deterrence policy, and they will operate at depth in the most perilous environments on Earth.

And, when that day comes, they won't care about our excuses.

They will care that their kit works. Their kit can be sustained. And, that their kit is lethal. And they will care that their submarine is full up round and ready to fight.

As Admiral Rickover reminded us, the future belongs to those who act.

The time for action is now not later and we must do so with urgency, discipline, and results.

Our Navy requires it. Our Nation demands it. And for the American people, we will follow through.

Thank you.