Command in Crisis: Thomas B. Modly | S.O.S. #263

A single bad week can define a leader, especially when the whole country is watching and the information is incomplete. Former acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly joins us for a candid, detailed conversation about what it’s like to make consequential decisions at the highest levels of Navy leadership and the Department of Defense, then live with the second-guessing long after the moment has passed. 

We start with his Cleveland upbringing as the child of Eastern European immigrants, his path through the Naval Academy, and a career that blends military aviation, teaching, business leadership, and Pentagon service. From there, we get practical about change management inside enormous institutions: why bureaucracy resists innovation, how priorities vanish after leadership turnover, and why he believes longer terms for service secretaries could help sustain real defense reform. We also talk about military due process and what the Gallagher case revealed to him about investigative assumptions and the need for specialized expertise in laws of armed conflict cases. 

Then we go to the most scrutinized moment: the USS Theodore Roosevelt COVID-19 outbreak. Modly explains how he processed risk, command breakdowns, crisis communication, and accountability, including the decision to relieve Captain Crozier and what he wishes he could have done differently face to face with the crew. We close with a clear-eyed look at naval strategy and shipbuilding, including what the 355-ship goal actually measures, why industrial base capacity matters more than slogans, and how workforce shortages can become a national security constraint. 

If you value thoughtful leadership lessons, Navy history that’s still unfolding, and honest reflection without the partisan filter, subscribe, share this conversation, and leave a review so more listeners can find Stories of Service.

Stories of Service presents guests’ stories and opinions in their own words, reflecting their personal experiences and perspectives. While shared respectfully and authentically, the podcast does not independently verify all statements. Views expressed are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the host, producers, government agencies, or podcast affi

Transcript

Welcome And Stakes Of Leadership

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Very few people have to lead in some of our most challenging positions in the United States Navy. But today we're going to talk to somebody who had to lead in one of the most pressurized environments and at some of the highest levels within the Department of Defense. Mr. Thomas Modley, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_03 0:19

Good. It's Modley, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Oh, thank you. Mostly.

SPEAKER_03 0:23

I'm doing well. Thank you, Teresa.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Well, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the Stories of Service podcast, ordinary people who do extraordinary work on the host of Stories of Service. And to kick this off, as we always do to get this started, an introduction from my father, Charlie Pickard.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

From the moment we're born and lock eyes with our parents, we are inspiring others. By showing up as a vessel of service, we not only help others, we help ourselves. Welcome to SOS Stories of Service, hosted by Teresa Carpenter, here from ordinary people from all walks of life who have transformed their communities by performing extraordinary work.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

And as I said today, we're going to be having a candid conversation about leadership at the highest levels of command. With oversight of 250 billion enterprise and nearly 1 million personnel, Mr. Thomas Modley was no stranger to pressure. But like many leaders, his defining moments came when the stakes were the highest and the path forward was anything but clear. We'll briefly visit the most scrutinized leadership moment in recent Navy history, which was the events surrounding the USS Theodore Roosevelt during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But we're not going to just re-regurgitate those headlines and we're going to explore something deeper and how leaders process imperfect information, make consequential decisions under intense pressure, and carry the weight of those decisions long after the moment is passed. Before his time as government, he built a reputation as a strategist and growth leader in the private sector, helping scale aviation and technology companies at an extraordinary pace. At Pricewater Coopers, he led global defense initiatives and worked on stabilization efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, bridging national security and business innovation. And now CEO of Bellaroc Ventures, he continues to shape conversations about leadership innovation in the future of defense while serving on boards, including Dragonfly. And today we're going to go beyond the biography, and it's about what happens to lead when every decision is scrutinized, when outcomes are uncertain, and when leadership is not judged in theory, but in action. Welcome again.

SPEAKER_03 2:24

Thanks, Teresa. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Awesome. So first off, I always ask my guests, where were they born and raised? And what was it about your backstory growing up that made you decide to enter into the naval service?

SPEAKER_03 2:39

Well, I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, in the Midwest, and but was sort of a growing up in a very sort of diverse neighborhood, felt a little different than most kids because my parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. My father escaped from Hungary in 1948 from behind the Iron Curtain, and my mother from Yugoslavia in 1950. And they both ended up in Cleveland in the 1950s and met there and were married and had five children and grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Shaker Heights, Ohio.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

So nothing about Ohio, as I'm from Columbus, Ohio, screams United States Navy. So I'm curious, what was it about your upbringing that drew you to not only join the military, but the Navy in particular?

SPEAKER_03 3:25

Well, I think that my my father did instill in me a high sense of patriotism. I think he was very cognizant and appreciative of the opportunities the United States gave him as a refugee and what they what it did for the continent of Europe to free them from the Nazis. And my father's, you know, Hungary sort of sat right in the middle of it all from Nazi occupation before the war and then the Soviet uh occupation after the war. And so he really saw it on all sides. And when he came to the U.S., he was very, very grateful for the opportunities that the nation gave him. And so he always instilled that in me. But in high school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. And I looked at a lots of different colleges to go to. And I had an uncle that lived near Washington, D.C., who said I should go take a look at the Naval Academy. And I walked onto the campus at Annapolis for the first time as a 17-year-old, having very little knowledge of it. But there was something about it that really resonated with me and called me to try to apply and identify that as the purpose that I wanted for my life. And so it turned out that I was able to get in, and that's how I ended up there.

Flying And Teaching Then Choosing Business

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Wow. So what was your early career like as a naval officer? Give me a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_03 4:40

Sure. Well, I I was pretty fortunate because when I got to the Naval Academy back in 79, I had I had validated a lot of undergraduate courses. I was fortunate to go to a very, very good high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in Shaker Heights, and had a lot of advanced mathematics and foreign language. And I decided that I looked at the curriculum and I saw that so much of the curriculum was heavily based in science, mathematics, engineering, that I wanted to have a little bit more of a rounded, well-rounded education. So I chose political science as my major. And because of that, and even though I was a political science major, I ended up obviously taking a lot more science, math, engineering courses than even political science courses just because of the core curriculum there. But because of my, my, my earlier academic background, I was able to validate a lot of courses in both foreign language as well as math. And so when it came around to my senior year, I was, I was, I didn't have any classes to take to finish my academic course. So they offered an option to about six or seven of us who were in the same position there at the time. And it was a very early program that Vice Admiral Waller was extremely supportive of. He was the superintendent. And that was to allow us, if we could get into a graduate program in Washington, to allow us to leave the academy two or three days a week and take graduate courses and start working on a master's degree. So I applied to Georgetown University and was accepted into their master's in government and international relations. And so my senior year, I was driving in there three times a week and taking classes there. And by the time I graduated from Annapolis, I was halfway to a master's degree and they there was a huge backlog in flight school. So they just said, why don't you stay here, finish the degree, and then start flight school in January, which I did. The reason I tell that story is because because of that, I got a sub-specialty coding in Palm Mill Affairs, which made me eligible for certain assignments that other people coming off their first sea tour wouldn't be eligible for. And as I rolled off my first sea tour as a helicopter pilot in Norfolk, I was eligible to go teach. And there were options at Annapolis and at the Air Force Academy. And I was plucked to go to the Air Force Academy to be an exchange professor there. And so I ended up there for three years teaching. And that was sort of the end of my active duty time. I did that, you know, so I was an active duty for seven years, half the time flying, half the time teaching. And I realized that the the responses I was getting from the detailers was, well, you're going to have to go back to back-to-back sea tours. You're going to have to transition to a different helicopter because the one I flew was being phased out. And I just looked at that and thought that that really wasn't the right path for me. And so I decided to get out of the service, stay in the reserves, and go to business school and went and got an MBA. And then my life took a totally different path.

Returning After 9/11 To Serve

SPEAKER_01 7:27

What what kind of business type of uh business leadership or business ventures did you think interested you most and why?

SPEAKER_03 7:36

Well, I was very interested. I was very interested in more general management type positions, rather. A lot of people go straight into finance or into consulting, things like that. I wanted to get a more rounded, well-rounded opportunity to get into a position in a company where I could eventually lead the company as a CEO or whatever. And so I went to a small aviation, actually, it was a publicly traded company, but it was based in Annapolis and it was an aviation firm. And they were doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions, acquiring new businesses into their portfolio. And so they brought me in there and put me in charge of that and had a very it was a great experience. I mean, I learned more in six months at work than I did, I would say, in two years of business school, just about business and how it works and and it's you know, specific industry, particularly aviation. And it was a good fit for me because I understood aviation. Obviously, a big chunk of aviation businesses are military, so I understood a lot of those airplanes and things like that. And so that's what that's sort of what I ended up doing.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

What was it about going back into government service that that really attracted you to want to come back? Because you could have stayed in the business community. And that's what I love about your story. And it was very similar to when I had David Shulkin on this past Thursday. It wasn't like he was angling to one day become the the the secretary of the VA. And I feel like you were you were in a similar position where you were already established in the business community at that point.

SPEAKER_03 9:07

Yeah, it's uh it there's a lot of serendipity in these things. It it's hard to believe that there is so much, but it is very true. I my first stint in government came right after 9-11, after being out of the military for what, 10 years or so. But after 9-11, I felt a calling. I really felt like I wanted to do something. I wanted to try and apply the skills that I had learned in business as well as in the military to help addressing these issues that we were facing after 9-11. And just by complete chance, I got a phone call from somebody I knew in the Pentagon who knew Secretary Rumsfeld, and they were setting up this new board for uh called the Defense Business Board, where they had brought in senior Rumsfeld had appointed a bunch of CEOs and senior executives from around the country to advise him on the business mission of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, and they needed somebody to run it. And they didn't want a pure military person, they didn't want a pure government person, and they didn't want, you know, somebody who it was straight out of the private sector. And so here I was. I had this background of both government from an academic perspective as well as in the military, and also had spent time in business. And so they brought me in to be the executive director of that. I did that job for a couple of years, and then President Bush was re-elected in 2004, and they asked me to fleet up and become the deputy under-secretary of defense for business for uh financial management, which which was responsible for the whole business transformation portfolio. And so, you know, it's just one of those things that just happens. You're kind of in the right place at the right time, and if you're doing a good job and people recognize you that you that you know what you're doing, you get the opportunities. So I did that for two or three more years, and then I felt like it was time to go back into the private sector, and that's when I landed at Pricewaterhouse Cooper's.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

So that first experience that you had with Millet, do you did you work in the Pentagon?

SPEAKER_03 10:59

Yes. Okay.

Fighting Bureaucratic Inertia In DoD

SPEAKER_01 11:01

And and and did you feel like at that point, I mean, there's a lot of people who I think feel, especially my audience, because we do have a lot of people that are people who are speaking truth to power or change agents, did you feel that there was resistance to change at that point or that you that it was tough to be innovative, to have ideas? Because a much of your book is about innovation and about breaking the status quo. And I'm curious if that if during that first experience that you had with the Pentagon, did you did you come up against that?

Rethinking Carriers And Long-Term Terms

SPEAKER_03 11:33

Or did you Oh for sure. I mean, that's I I wrote about I wrote about this a lot in my book. As you know, in my book I I highlight heroes and villains in every at the end of every chapter. And a lot of the hillens are a lot of the heroes are people that I talk about, are change agents, the people who tell the truth, you know, the true believers. These are the types of people that are there. They're embedded, they're there in the in the in the bureaucracy. But oftentimes they get, you know, they get bulldozed over. And frankly, a lot of the really innovative ones, particularly the ones in uniform, they end up leaving. They just get too frustrated with it and they end up leaving and they end up doing extremely well on the outside. But I've used this analogy lots of times before. It's it's that inertia, and inertia is one of the villains in the book that I talk about. That inertia in an organization that size is extremely, extremely resistant to change. And it's like a big boulder rolling down a hill. And you know, if you stick your head up and try to if you if you can like somehow figure out a way to nudge it down a path, a different path, it's still gonna roll down the path, but maybe it's gonna go a little bit different direction. But if you try and stand in front of it, it's just gonna crush you and it's just gonna gain speed. And so it's that's really what it's like there. And so you have to be, you have to be extremely persistent, you have to be very, very focused, and you have to build a team around you who believes with you. Otherwise, it's very easy to get undermined. And unfortunately for our system of government, it's a it's a blessing and a curse because we we we change government so often due to the will of the people. And the will of the people is fickle, is and is pretty fickle these days. And so you end up having this sine wave of change every four years, and sometimes within that four years, with you know, every two years, and the names and the faces of the people trying to combat that inertia change, and their priorities change. So, like the priorities that I was pushing as under secretary and as secretary, particularly as acting secretary, a lot of those initiatives got just completely disappeared like the next day after I left. I was just texting someone, yeah. Yeah, I was just texting with someone about this the other day because someone was asking questions about the aircraft carrier and why haven't we looked at it differently about the aircraft carrier? And why why is it the aircraft carrier can't be you know in the Persian Gulf? And what are we afraid of? And and you know, that's a pretty good question. And I set up a task force in January of 2020. One of the first things I did was to re-look at the carrier. And we we had about a five to seven year window where we didn't have to make a carrier decision. We were already locked in all the way through C V18, CVN81, and we didn't have to make another decision for four or five years. I said, this is the perfect window for us to take a look at the carrier in the future of it and determine whether or not it's the right ship for us to be building for the future of the Navy. And I had a board of uh very prominent people, John Layman, uh John Warmer, former Secretary Warner, I asked him to chair it, several other people was bipartisan. And John Warner came to my office and he basically said to me, he said, Mr. Secretary, I will do this, but if there's are you gonna stop us if we come back with the conclusion that we don't need to build these anymore at all? And I said, I am not prejudging anything you guys are doing. I said, I need some outside eyes and brains to take a look at this question and help us figure out what the best way forward is for this. Because a decision like that has very deep ramifications for the industrial base, and you know, you have to be prepared for that. So um I felt like having that seven years would have been great, but literally the day after I left, they stood down that task force, and I don't think anyone's looked at it since.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of initiatives that I think you you tried to do that they did that with. They did that with the education initiatives that you did. They did that with the ship naming that you had. And uh I think that's got to be so frustrating. And it's very similar to the conversation. I I keep comparing it, but it's very similar to the conversation that I had with David Shulkin because I wonder if there might be some utility to keeping political appointees in for longer, regardless of their political affiliation. It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense because all we're doing is we're teeter-tottering between two two two ideologies, and that's not really beneficial for an apolitical military that just wants to grow and innovate and get better.

SPEAKER_03 16:11

Yeah, and I well, I agree with that. However, I don't think we live in an era right now where that would be possible, uh, to be honest with you. There's just not enough comedy, comedy C O M I T Y in the Congress to be able to come up with something like that. But I have made that argument before that I think that there is a very strong reason to take a look at creating 10-year terms for the service secretaries. Because the service secretaries are not responsible for deploying forces or making decisions of war or within war. They're responsible for man training and equip. Okay. So these are massive enterprises. And if you're going to try and shift the focus of these massive enterprises in a different direction, which I believe we need to with the Navy, you know, I believe in a much more distributed fleet with a lot more assets and a lot more unmanned, still balancing off sort of the traditional power that we have in the larger ships. But in order to do that, that's a that's a 10, that's a minimum of a 10-year proposition. And if every couple of years that priority changes, like the previous secretary, you know, he had a big priority about climate change. He felt that was the Navy's, you know, responsibility to deal with climate change. That's great. I mean, okay, but that may be important, but it's not a priority, it wouldn't have been a priority for me or or somebody else. So and there's there really isn't enough uh naval leadership that's non, uh, how would I put this, that's non-parochial on naval force. Do you know what I mean? It's yeah, the people who are the loudest talkers, speakers about naval force have massive parochial interests in shipbuilding and things like that, um, because it impacts their state substantially. There isn't a broad coalition of people out there that really understand it or want to understand it or want to work together across the aisle to solve the problem. So trying to find a suitable secretary, which would have to have bipartisan, I believe would have to have or want to have bipartisan support to serve for 10 years, I I don't think it's possible right now. In and in and even like getting the legislation to make that a reality, I think it's not possible right now. That's a complicated thing. Determining the naval force of the future is a complicated thing. And quite frankly, our Congress can't do simple things right now.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Right.

SPEAKER_03 18:37

Um, and I'm not that's not a that's not a judgment on any one individual. I'm just saying it's a fact.

Due Process Lessons From Gallagher

SPEAKER_01 18:43

No, you're right. So you look at the appropriations bills. I mean, how that's like you can't even pass a budget. If you can't even pass a budget, then you can't really work on the bigger things. And and I think that's an overall communications problem, too. It's got so many different layers in in in it, in in that way we which we communicate, we we we we are uh sadly, especially on social media, we're rewarded if there's more outrage, if there's more divisiveness. And and that's and I'm not saying we're rewarded, I'm saying that the big tech companies and the algorithms, that's what they reward. And so that's what you see the most of. And but if you sit down and talk to people face to face, even if they disagree with you and they are on the complete other side of the aisle, like you you mentioned in your book, you you you struck up a great friendship with with Tim Kane, and and he was a Democrat, and it didn't matter. And so that that is something we have to see more of so that we can solve these these big time problems. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, because you you speak a lot about shipbuilding, you speak a little bit about sexual assault, sexual harassment, but from a personnel issue, one of my passion projects is the due process issue within the military, not just sexual assault, not just sexual harassment, but trying to make changes to the IG system and the court-martial system so that people really feel like they they they have due process within the system when workplace contact conflicts arise or when crimes happen. And I'm curious from your perspective and what you saw as as SecNav, what what you thought from a criminal justice standpoint or from an IG standpoint could be improved as we move forward.

SPEAKER_03 20:23

Wow, that's a that's a that's a tough question for me to answer because I although NCIS sort of reported up through me, I mean I did get briefings from them all the time, I was not intimately involved in a lot of sort of litigation and court proceedings and things like that. So I was I was a legal officer on a ship, so I do know I do understand the league, I do understand the legal justice system to some extent. I can tell you the the the one case that I was involved in that I knew intimately was the Gallagher case because they were briefing me on that one early on in the investigation. And I always felt like they're the they they had concluded well in advance of evidence that that he was guilty. And and it was hard to really see the evidence a lot of times. But they they felt it was airtight, and they felt, you know, a lot of them felt that his reputation in the SEALs was that it was that he was a bad guy, and so on and so forth. And I'm like, you know, I'm thinking to myself, that's that's great, but you know, you got to be able to prove this. And in the end, they were unable to prove it.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Right.

SPEAKER_03 21:28

And so I immediately after that case happened, it became obvious to me that we needed to sort of reorganize some of NCIS and even some of the JAG Corps to have lawyers and investigators who are very familiar with laws of armed conflict, those types of cases, because that's not the way the case was assigned. It was let generally assigned to whoever was the investigator there in San Diego got the case. The case was cold for two years, so there really was no physical evidence. So it made it, it made it difficult to prosecute the case. But my Mm my understanding is that Omar Lopez, who's the head of NCIS, actually did institute that, that they have sort of a if they have these these law of arm conflict cases, they're able to basically assemble a team of people who are experienced to address them. But, you know, we we were at war for 20 years there in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I just don't think that we were as ready to deal with those as we should have been or could have been.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Right. Right. And it's a very difficult issue because the military is so insular. And I can see where uh, you know, I I I also was an investigating officer. I've I've done it three times in my career and seen it from different sides. And if you were to take every single one of these IG cases outside the chain of command, you would never get anything else done. It's bad enough taking on an investigation and trying to do it as a collateral duty. So there's not a really good answer. I mean, there's initiatives underway right now to give investigating officers more training. There are initiatives to reform some of the court-martial uh proceedings so that they mirror some of the same protections that we have in the civilian sector. But it is a it is a very, very difficult thing to tackle. And so I understand when when people try to try to approach these issues how how hard they really are to to make changes. And that kind of goes back to what I we were talking about earlier with the fact that that the SECNAV is only there for maybe four years or sometimes not even four years. And so to be able to make these sweeping changes to reform the system, one thing that always comes to mind for me is the idea that to make the kinds of changes that you can make for the future, you you have to be invested within the organization for 10, 20, 30 years. And there's just not many people that are in that position other than the general officers or the flag officers. And so that that's a difficult thing to do when you don't have the time to do that. But you did make a lot of great initiatives while you were there. Can you take a look tell me a little bit about what you would classify as some of the the top things that that you and your team you think you're most proud of while you were there?

Education For Sea Power And Community College

SPEAKER_03 24:11

Let me comment on let me comment on what you just said though, too. The continuity, the continuity that you talk about in the general officer corps is critical to execution of the mission. But I think even they would agree, a lot of them would agree, that it makes them a lot more resistant to ideas that come from outside of their experience. And so the best ones, the best ones are very willing to open up their minds and think about things differently and so on. And you start seeing that break like at the 06 level, 05, 06 level. And the ones who are really, really open to it look at that path to flag and to general officer and they find themselves not that interested in it because it does it is a very difficult path. If you're a change agent or if you want to try and really do some radical things, I think they recognize that they're going to be stymied in a lot of those, in a lot of those efforts. And so you sort of have to make a choice, you sort of have to make a choice whether to try and work on it from the inside or try to go outside and accelerate those changes some other way. And some people just don't even bother doing that. They just leave and go do something else completely. So yeah, it's it's it's a it's a very difficult, it's a difficult thing to try and to try and find the right balance between the experience and the expertise that you need to have, and then the judgment and the innovative mind that looks outside of that basic experience for for new ways of doing things. And so I talk a lot about that in my book about this famous phrase that I heard a million times, which is that you know, that's not how we do things in the Navy. And I think that's the worst possible thing you can say to a young sailor, you know. Um, so I tried to fight against that as much as I could, both in my vectors and other things when I would talk to people. So I when you you ask about some of the things that I was, I guess I'm most I guess I'm most proud of in terms of my time there. I suppose the Education for Sea Power initiative is one of the most important things that I that I did there, or that I tried to do there. And it wasn't just me, it was a lot of people that I brought in to help with that effort, to include uh Secretary Barbara Barrett and General John Allen and and several others who were really helpful in in helping us think through these things. But really the idea was how do we prepare officers, naval officers, Marine Corps officers for a future of unpredictability where they're gonna have to rely more on their minds than brute force, and more on innovation than tradition. And that that had to somehow permeate through the entire education system. And I felt like we were really under-leveraging our our education system from the war college to the postgraduate school to the naval academy. They were sort of very disconnected in leveraging the knowledge in all those different places and we and the Navy also the Marine Corps not so much, but the Navy traditionally hasn't really valued education all that much as part of an officer's progression. Certainly not as much as the Air Force. And I experienced this when I was on the faculty at the Air Force Academy. I mean, uh the Air Force has like a 90%, 90% military faculty, and they made it and so does West Point. I mean, they did that intentionally, and I think they they did it because they wanted to have officers who had advanced degrees and were able to teach, be in the classroom with the cadets, with an academic experience and also a military part of it that sort of integrates the two views. The Naval Academy chose a different path. They have a 50% civilian faculty. That's what I went through. I thought it was perfectly fine. I thought it was great. My favorite professors from the Naval Academy were the civilians. I was still in touch with them, you know, some of them my favorite people and and smartest people. And not sure what I would have gotten the same education from a military officer that I got from those folks. So so I can see the arguments on both sides. And my argument is not for changing that balance. I don't know. I know Secretary Heggseth wants to change, change that balance, but I think it's more because the the nature of some of the professors, the political nature of some of the professors is not in line with where he is politically. And so and sometimes that rears its head in the classroom. I never saw it, but you know, let's let's be fair. I was there, I was there in the 80s, you know, it's a different time frame. People were less vocal about their personal beliefs at the time, you know, and so and also the span of politics was a lot narrower. So, you know, you had Jimmy Carter on one side, you know. I come in there, Jimmy Carter's on one side, run against Ronald Reagan. Jimmy Carter is a naval academy graduate. He's not exactly a radical liberal, you know, left-winger at all, but left still believed in a strong military, everything else, and he had naval academy roots, and you know, Ronald Reagan on the other side. So they weren't that far apart as they are now. And so I think those differences in our society have been reflected within the faculty, and I think that causes some concern for people. But what I was trying to do really was I wasn't really looking at that issue, it was more about how how are we preparing young people for this cognitive era? You know, are we giving them enough on training and education around both strategy and critical thinking and artificial intelligence and all these things that are going to dominate the future security landscape? And I just didn't feel that we were. And so we we set up a system to do that. And also for the enlisted folks, because they're at sea so much and and and deployed, it's very difficult for them to get degrees. And so we set up something called the Naval Community College, which has survived, thankfully, which allows them to pursue undergraduate degrees or an associate's degree while they're while they're enlisted. We had a partnership with several different online universities around the country, universities who have online content uh to facilitate this and accreditate it. And so I'm very, very happy with that, very proud of that. And I'm glad that that's continuing. But some of the other stuff has really not really gone anywhere.

Turning Vectors Into A Leadership Book

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Yeah, it's tough. It's really tough to keep to keep these kind of programs going. But I I'm so grateful for my education. I mean, I got my undergrad by active duty time service through the Seaman Admiral 21 program. I took college classes while I was on a ship through the we had instructors while I was on deployment when I was enlisted who would fly out to the ship and and teach college courses. And then I've gotten two master's degrees while on active duty, one during my off time and one where I took a leave of 18 months to go get a graduate degree. And then now as a retiree, I'm still using the GI Bill. So I I I can't even be more grateful for the educational opportunities that the military has brought. But you not only made such a great contribute contribution to the Navy, I I really do want to focus in on your book a little bit more too. Because the book is written as a it's really written as a business book, too. That's what I think I love about it. It's it's you you took your your vectors, which was, as I understand it, a a weekly message that you would write to the to the fleet and to to the to the navy, and you you centered the book around uh chapters around that. And then you also did around songs and music that that sort of set the theme for each one of the chapters. As you were writing the book, did it occur to you that this was more of a leadership in a business book, or was it more of a reflective journey of this is what happened, this was my experience, and for the next SECNEV or someone else who's in this type of position, these are the things to expect because there's so much in here about programming and budgeting and and really what it takes to move the needle and try to implement change.

SPEAKER_03 32:14

Well, it's a good question. I think I mentioned before we started the interview. I I sat down in the fall of 2020 to try and chronicle everything that happened in the last week of my time as the acting secretary, which wasn't the greatest time of my life, but but still probably obviously one of the most impactful times of my life. And I sat down and tried to chronicle that because I wanted to write like a long-form article that maybe somebody like The Atlantic or New Yorker or some one of these magazines would pick up, proceedings, whatever, would pick it up. And I wrote the piece, and it was called The 25 Questions I Was Never Asked About the COVID outbreak on the USS Teddy Roosevelt. And so it was sort of sort of based around that. And it goes through great detail about everything that happened while it was still fresh in my mind. And I I have a pretty good memory, and so I remembered a lot. I the only notes I was able to take out of the Pentagon really was my calendar. I mean, so that's all I didn't have anything else other than my memory and stuff that was out there in the public, like the vectors and things like that, and some of my speeches. So I never returned to the Pentagon when I got back from Guam. I I got to my apartment and they told me that I was being quarantined for COVID and so on. So I never really got back. But but anyway, so I wrote this thing and I tried to shop it around and and basically the only people basically said to me, like, if you're not going to be slamming President Trump or providing any dirt on that whole situation, we're really not interested. You know, this is the fall of 2020, right? This is an election year. And so there just wasn't a lot of interest in it. So I put it on the shelf. I said, okay, you know, I'll just I'll formalize this and file it somewhere, and that'll be it. And then I had a conversation with a friend of mine who had published a book, and he said, well, talk to my publicist and see what they think. And she read it and she said she suggested to me, well, you know, that it's it's really interesting, but it's kind of incomplete without the whole story of everything that happened before then, because I think that'll probably add a lot of context. So why don't you just write a memoir about your time as the under enacting secretary? And so I thought, well, because I don't really want to do that. That's a lot of work.

SPEAKER_01 34:28

It was, I mean, this is such a detailed book. I mean, if you guys see like how thick this is, and and I mean, you have illustrations in here. You had an illustrator that you worked with to kind of capture each chapter. I mean, it was yes, so I understand.

SPEAKER_03 34:43

So I said, I'm not really, I really wasn't that motivated to do that. And then a little bit of time passed. I thought, okay, well, let me let me outline this. And if I were to do this, how would I do this? How would I actually write this? Well, the last two weeks of the book were basically so I decided to do a chronological approach to the thing. And the first five chapters were basically context, you know, and basically gives you a sense for how did I end up there? What did I try to do as undersecretary? And then chapter five, you know, the sort of the principal things that I was working on, and some of the things that happened, and some of the things that happened in that first two years, it really influenced my judgment about things later. And then chapter five is when everything starts melting down. We had the Gallagher situation. My boss, Secretary Spencer, was fired by Secretary Asper, but really by President Trump. And the next thing I know, I'm acting secretary, and I got a note from someone that said, you know, the average tenure of an acting secretary of the Navy is 110 days. So what are you gonna do? And so I came up with my top 10 list. I did a lot of top 10 lists, I've always done that. And I came up with 11 top 10 lists for the 110 things I wanted to accomplish in those 110 days, and we just started ticking them off. But one of the things I did during that, I committed to during that time was to write a note to the entire fleet, entire organization, a million people every Friday, just to tell them what I was thinking about, what was important, what they should be thinking about. And I tried to lace in, you know, some sports analogies and stuff that's going on just to keep them interested and so on. So those were the vectors. So the book basically, the first five chapters are context. The next 19 chapters are my 19 weeks as the acting secretary of the Navy. And I outlined the book. Obviously, it was easy to do just by date, and then I didn't really even think about what the chapter title would be, but I sat down one night and looked at all the music I liked and thought about the week and thought, oh, this is a really good song that would work. Uh and I did literally did all the songs first and then started writing. And the the last two chapters were pretty much written from that article that I'd written about the 25 questions. But when I I stuck them there at the end, and when I got to chapter whatever it was, 22, I was like, Oh, I'm done. And I read the whole thing through and I realized that everything at the end made didn't make as much sense because the frame of mind that I had, the state of mind that I had when I wrote that, was very different because I hadn't spent all that time reflecting upon everything. Do you know what I mean? So I got to it, I was like, oh my gosh, I gotta change this now because it doesn't it doesn't tick back to everything that affected me and and and why I did certain things. And I was able to pull some stories forward that made sense into the context of the end of the story. So that's how I did it. And you know, I couldn't really kind of same kind of challenge as trying to get it published because people who you know who publish political memoirs are looking for dirt. And yeah, your book is not dirt. It's not there's no there's no dirt in it at all. I didn't know I didn't cast any aspersions on anybody. Some may have deserved it, but I didn't. And uh that's not the kind of book I wanted to write. So that's how I ended up finishing it. And I was able to connect with I was able to connect with the people at Forbes book, who Forbes books who end up write publishing a lot of books by like CEOs and and thought leaders, business thought leaders. And they thought it would fit right into their into their niche. So I went with them and it was turned out great.

USS Theodore Roosevelt COVID Decision

SPEAKER_01 38:20

It it really did. And I mean, the Amazon reviews speak for themselves. And I mean, if you go, if you go on Amazon and you and you look up this book, you can see just just floods of, you know, I'll go on solo layout. Here is the book, it's Vectors, Heroes, Billains, and Heartbreak on the Bridge of the US Navy. And I mean, people I I love reading the I I went and I checked out the reviews on our morning walk this morning, and it were so many people who talked about how the book was a good book for business. The book is a good book for anyone who wants to make change in an organization, and here's all the here's all the ways to to work through those changes, and here's all the things that you that you have to do. And I think as we transition to to what happened during COVID, I think the thing that really struck me as as you told that story was the fact that you owned that decision when you saw that you and Admiral Gilday were not going to agree on what needed to be done, because my understanding is he wanted the investigation to play out and he wanted to not relieve the captain right away. You you you stood up. You didn't have to do that. Like you could have just uh concurred with your military leadership, let everything play out, let this letter go un you know unanswered of what of what happened, but you didn't do that, you took action. And so tell us a little, tell me a little bit about why you why you made that decision, because that was a very hard decision.

SPEAKER_03 39:51

You know, it was a hard decision to make, only in the sense that I knew that the fallout wasn't going to be very favorable for me. But it wasn't a hard decision to make on the facts for me, really. And so I feel badly about having to relieve Captain Crozier. I think he's a good guy and a good officer, and clearly has proved himself, had proved himself to be that. I just felt like that in that moment, that ship was in a crisis, and I just felt he was making not good decisions in a crisis. And and for me, I was responsible, I'm the responsible person of the head of the department. And I needed to make a decision in the best interest of the Navy and of that ship and of that crew. And I just felt like what he had what he had really really done is he had taken he had taken the Navy and for whatever reason, his fears, his concerns, his love for his crew, which I think are all valid things, and he take he put the Navy in the center of the COVID crisis. And I think the nation at the time, and perhaps he didn't understand this context, and I don't blame him for not, but I think that the nation at the time was so I you know I called it a big national freak out over this thing. I think that what this did was it made people think that the Navy couldn't handle it. And I think that what the nation always needs to believe is that the Navy can handle it. If anyone can handle it, the Navy can handle it, and forces can handle it. And frankly, all the other ships in the Navy, and I spoke to every CEO of every ship and installation in the Navy that had COVID. They all had my personal phone number. I told them if they don't feel like they're getting the support they need, they can call me directly and you know, so there'd be dispensation for them to do that. And I said, you know, we've got to work this together as a team. And if you feel like you're not getting support, you know, let me know. And he never heard about any other issues on any other ship except this one. Right. Including, including uh the Ronald Reagan, which also, you know, which had also had some COVID cases out there in Japan. But they had I spoke to that CEO, and I mean they had everything, everything was calm, everything was, you know, they were they were working on it normally. So I don't really know exactly what happened. I mean, I've read a lot of actor after action on this stuff, but I think, frankly, I think the ship's doctors scared a lot of people. They had sent a memo also that said that within 10 days, the first the first line in this memo was the this is two days or one day after getting into Guam, that the battle against COVID on the Teddy Roosevelt has been lost. And that if we didn't evacuate all the sailors immediately, that within 10 days, 50 sailors were going to be dead from COVID. So I think throughout the entire COVID crisis, we lost one sailor to COVID, active duty, is what I've been told. So this is an extreme overreaction by the doctors. I don't blame them for not knowing any better. I do blame them for not seeking advice from people higher in the military chain of command that to in terms of how to deal with this. None of these doctors were infectious disease specialists or immunologists. You know, they were basically flight surgeons and dentists and, you know, physical therapists and those types of things. And so I they in this memo, the thing that caused the greatest alarm for me was that in the last line of the memo, they said that it was their intention to make this information known to the public so that basically the world understood what was happening on the Teddy Roosevelt. And I think that that line, and Captain Crozier told me when I spoke to him in Guam that he told the doctors not to send that letter. And and he was he was he he they were sending it to the head of the Navy military medical command and I think the CNO. I was not on distribution on that. And he said he told them not to do it. I said, Well, you know they did send it, right? He goes, Yes, sir, I do know. I said, Why are they still there? Like you're the commanding officer of the ship. They disobeyed a direct order from you. And he really couldn't answer the question. You know, and then it when I when I asked him about the why he sent his letter through the unsecure channels and I I believe that he didn't leak it. I don't think he leaked it. Someone that he sent it to leaked it to the to the media. But he didn't c take care that it would not be leaked. There's all kinds of secure communications channels on that ship that he could have used, to include calling me, because we'd already reached out to him a couple days before. But he said that I asked him why he didn't talk it over with the strike group commander, who's the admiral on the ship. And he said that he knew that the strike group commander would not let him send it out. And so he just decided to do it anyway. And so to me, that's premeditated insubordination. And it was, it was kind of, and and then the strike group commander later confirmed that he told him that too.

SPEAKER_01 44:45

Yeah. So it was a breakdown between the two of them. I mean, that's obviously what happened.

SPEAKER_03 44:49

Surely it certainly was. That's their job to make sure there isn't one, you know, particularly in a crisis. Yeah. So, you know, to me, the the solution that Admiral Gilday and I was I admittedly very frustrated with Admiral Gilday because I implored him to pick up the phone and call the captain. Yes, that's in your book multiple multiple times. And he just didn't feel like that was his job to do that. He wanted to rely on the chain of command. And frankly, no one in the chain of command, either Bill Merce or Accelino, any of those guys, called me and said, Don't do it. Don't, you know, we'll work. No one said anything. No one was really defending him. And I don't even think that Admiral Gilday was defending him. I just think he wanted to sort of you know put it aside so it wouldn't be an issue anymore. But the the strategy they came up with was to suspend him until the investigation was over. And and I said, investigations like this take weeks and weeks.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

Oh, it would have taken months. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 45:48

And and he said, no, it'll be over in. I said, how long? And he said, it'll be over in days. I said, okay, well, you obviously are either not being truthful or you haven't been in the Navy very long. Because we know we know how long this happen how long this takes. And I just felt like the ship needed to get back in control. They needed to get back out to sea. They needed to execute the plan that we had put in place on Guam to get the sailors clear the virus and go. And I felt like if we had him there sitting in some BOQ in Guam on suspension, I think the crew would have been still looking at him as a CEO. He would have been viewed as a martyr. It just was, it just, it wouldn't have ended. And it just really needed to end so that we could get the thing back at sea. And we brought Rick Sardiello, Admiral Sardiello, in. He had been the previous CEO, and the ship was back at sea like in a week and a half or something, and you never heard another word.

SPEAKER_01 46:40

So that's the part of the story that nobody talks about either. Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Like and then that's why I'm so appreciative of the fact that you wrote the book, because I think that there are still to this day, I wouldn't be surprised if people at the Naval Academy and joint staff, college, or wherever else are studying this whole incident as a case study, and very similar to like any other big Navy issue, like Fat Leonard, you really need to hear things from all sides. And I think that's one of the things I really strive to do on the Stories of Service podcast. I don't want to see things from a partisan lens. I don't want to see things from just one person's point of view. I really want to know what happened and what was the bigger picture going on. And you filled a lot of those gaps. But has Captain Crozier has he been invited? Maybe not.

SPEAKER_03 47:51

I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 47:52

And that's what's unfortunate. And that's my whole point is that we're we're not going to learn from these issues unless we have open conversations. And I appreciate the fact that you and as you saw, I sent you a podcast. The doctor has also gone public with his side of the story. And I think that people need to need to, even if the sides of the story people don't agree on, and if someone's going to take sides, and I'm not here to take sides because I think that everybody has their own perspective of what they saw based on it. But what we can say is there was a breakdown in communication and a breakdown in leadership on that ship.

SPEAKER_03 48:26

Yeah. Let me correct what I said. The one group that asked me in to come talk about this specifically as they were studying it as a case was the public affairs school at Fort Meade. And that was through Derek Ingrid. Through Derek, who you know, who was my PAO. He he asked me to come in and speak to them. Because they there are there were some public affairs implications from this whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 48:47

Obviously. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:48

I made I made the conscious decision when I went to Guam to go talk to the crew and get eyes on everything that's happening there not to take public affairs with me because I did not want it to be viewed as a public relations thing or anything like that. And when we got to Guam, we were touring some of the hospitals that have been created for the crew. There was a base photographer there, a Navy photographer there taking pictures of me. And I I went over to her and thanked her. I said, but you we're not taking any pictures. I don't want this is not about publicizing anything about me being here. I'm here to just kind of get to the ground to truth and try to make the crew feel a little better about their situation. And I didn't do great, I didn't do so well on that part of it. And I admit, I admit that.

SPEAKER_01 49:36

Yeah. And I mean, I think though, again, I kind of go back to until you're in the hot seat and until you are in the arena, you really have no idea. It was kind of, I mean, a very small level on my end that I can relate to what you just said is the fact that everybody told me your biggest thing that you have to do when you go to a carrier is not get fired, because it's the hardest job in our community. And I was kind of like, well, there's a lot more I want to do as a carrier PAO besides just not get fired. But then I got into that position and I saw all the different ways that you're sort of set up to fail sometimes just because you've got two bosses, you are running a DV program that nobody wants, and you have to sell it as though it's like the best thing since sliced bread because AirPac wants it. I mean, there's just so many things that that you deal with in that job. I mean, I I've never had a harder job in my public affairs career than that job. And so it's like I can understand like you you really don't know what it's like to lead at certain levels and to make decisions at certain levels unless you are put in that position. And the one thing that I do really credit you for is the fact that you took ownership of this issue and you saw around you that other people were not taking ownership. But when I read your book and I see sort of the pattern, the trajectory of your career, what you did at your your your when you were first at the Pentagon, what all the initiatives and the change that you tried to bring and the ways you tried to make the organization better, it all makes sense that this was how you were going to deal with it. And you might have said some words on the 1MC that shouldn't have been said, or you put it in a way that may wasn't maybe PR savvy, but you were also dealing with a hostile crew that was already biased against you based on what had what they had were being told and and what they their fear level. If if the CO is afraid, if the doctor's afraid, everyone's afraid. And it's really hard to counter that once it's taken hold.

SPEAKER_03 51:35

Well, I would say that the advice that they gave you about a carrier and your number one job is to not get fired, is quite possibly the worst advice anyone could give.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

Absolutely. It was terrible.

SPEAKER_03 51:45

You should never worry about that. You should never worry about that.

SPEAKER_01 51:47

Right. It was awful.

SPEAKER_03 51:49

But I will give you some, I will give you some that's better advice than that. Like, don't ever give a speech on the one MC. That's my advice to anyone. Anyone going to a carrier, don't ever do it.

SPEAKER_01 51:59

And you had so many challenges with the masks, and then it just just you couldn't, there were so many ways you couldn't communicate with it.

SPEAKER_03 52:07

You know, that was totally not what I wanted to do. I wanted to like walk around the ship and talk to people and see how they were doing and let them know, like face to face, like, here's what's going on on shore, because I'd seen it all. I'd met with the governor, I heard knew about what was happening with the hotel rooms and the hospitals they had put together and the 900 people that were scrambling around getting them meals and all this. And I didn't get to do any of it. I didn't didn't get to do any of it. And but when I got when I when I on my way down to the ship, I got this list of questions from the crew, and they they were largely hostile, you know. Just you know, just you know, how many dead sailors were going to be acceptable to you before you got us any help and this type of thing? And so I was I was definitely keyed up in the moment and probably should have been and should have checked myself a little bit. But I honestly, I didn't even the first part of that talk, I don't frankly, I didn't even remember it, and I didn't even listen to it again until maybe December of 2020, when I sort of felt like okay, I should listen to this again. And and I was kind of surprised at listening to it, just not so much about what I said, but like, you know, I had sort of gotten the impression that that I was like on some kind of tirade or something based on the way it was characterized. And I and I listened to my voice, and I really was not that I was pretty calm. I thought I mean I I don't know what other people thought, but I felt like I was pretty calm, and like the very end of it, I basically relayed them this speech that I'd given at the Naval Academy about not being so concerned about loving the people that you work for, but you know, focus your love on the people that work for you and the mission and the country. And I thought that was a very positive message, but none of that was reported. So, you know, what can you do? They'll they'll report what they want to report.

Aftermath Threats Then Rebuilding Life

SPEAKER_01 53:52

So well, I I think though the the the success story and all this, and the reason I wanted really to interview you is to show too, also that life goes go on. And after this, you you are still thriving and you have a career, and and and that is another, I think, lesson learned that people can take away from this. You you can have something happen that may not have been the way you wanted things to end, but life does go on. So tell me a little bit about what after you you decided to resign, what what what did the next few months after that look like? And how did you process what had happened and move forward?

SPEAKER_03 54:28

Well, we were sort of hunkered down for three months afterwards. There were we had received a lot of death threats and crazy people not being happy with me. And so we had NCIS protection in our house for three months, and actually at one point somebody showed up and took pictures of the home and and posted them on the internet on pro Captain Crozier websites, and and then uh apparently as the NCIS told me they they went to go, they started tracking this guy, and he was buying guns and ammunition, and finally his wife reported him. They went to go, they went to go talk to him or arrest him, and his house was rigged with crossbows, so that if people came in the house, they would have been hit with these crossbows. So, you know, that was that was pretty stressful for three months or so. And then we sort of made the decision that we lived in that house for about 20 years, raised our kids there, and after having you know three to five NCIS cars in front of it for three months, it just didn't feel like the same place to us anymore. And so we decided we were gonna start new somewhere. So we have two children that live down here in Florida, and we looked both east coast and west coast and ended up on the west coast of Florida near one of my daughters here and moved down here in 2021 and been here, been here since then, doing a lot of traveling. My wife is the ship sponsor for the USS Cleveland, so we're very involved with stuff happening in the city of Cleveland right now for the ship, which is going to get commissioned here in May. And that's one of these incredible blessings of the job. Like you I recount in my book sitting in the Pentagon parking lot right prior to going in for my interview with Secretary Mattis for the under-secretary job and wondering whether or not I should even take the job if it's offered, because you know, obviously it's a huge pay cut, and you know, the Trump administration was controversial, and the, you know, Congress people were not, a lot of people in Congress were not in favor of him, nor were a lot of Republicans in favor of him. And so there's a lot of downside, a lot of potential downside, but I just decided that I would, for a variety of reasons, that it would be the right thing to do if if asked to do it. And I can tell you that it changed my life in terms of the relationships that I have now that I would never have had. And I can't imagine my life now without those relationships. These are hundreds of people we've met in Cleveland because of the ship and my wife's involvement there that I never would have met and who are, you know, just I just enjoy so much now. People in Washington, people on my staff, people that were, you know, chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, my deputy undersecretary of of the Navy for policy. These are all, and a whole lot of other military people. I never would have met, never would have had any interaction with the ambassador to Hungary. I met, you know, the the US ambassador, or sorry, the Hungarian ambassador of the United States is a friend of mine. I never would have met, I never would have met any of these people had I not had the job. And it brings into focus that really that that's really the most important thing in life, really, is the relationships that you have. And if you can have relationships with people who you can believe in and that you love, I mean, there's nothing more. So we expanded our circle of people like that substantially just because of this job. And I am very, very proud of it. And I I am very grateful to have had the opportunity. It's, you know, sometimes when I go back to the Naval Academy for football games and things like that, I there's part of me that wishes I could just be the guy that never had the job. So I could just be a normal, you know, classmate out there tailgating or whatever. But you have to realize that it's a huge privilege and it doesn't come to everybody and and like I said, a lot of serendipity in it. But there's clearly purpose in all of it for me. So anyway, so I'm down here now. I started a small consulting firm and I'm doing some advising and board work, mostly in exchange for equity for startup type companies. And then I'm working on a second book right now that's taking a little pause from right now, but I hope to get it done this year. And it's very different and very interesting to me. So hopefully I'll hit that, I'll hit that goal this year.

SPEAKER_01 58:47

Are you able to share any details about the second book or are you not ready to yet?

SPEAKER_03 58:50

Oh, sure. I'm happy to talk, you know, broad strokes on it. It's it's a it's a historic it's historical fiction and it's based on the late 1930s and 1940s in Hungary and Yugoslavia, where my parents were raised, and some of the interesting things that happened and tragic things that happened during that time. So the book is a combination of three different types of characters, ones that are fictionalized characters based on my family, others are true historic figures, and then others are just people that I've made up based on reading through. Okay, here's a character I can make up based on this. So and that's sort of how and the story sort of comes together on how those lives sort of intertwine over the course of that seven-year period, really 1938 to 1945. And so it's it's uh it's a lot different than this than this other one. There are some things I'll probably use, uh really want to do illustrations again, so I'll probably do that again. And now with AI tools, it's you know, it's totally simple to do this now. So I'll probably use AI tools to help with the illustrations. But I think it's a really interesting and good and good story, and I'm hoping people will uh read it and appreciate it.

The 355-Ship Goal And Shipyard Reality

SPEAKER_01 1:00:03

Well, I love it. Well, you're a very excellent writer. I mean, this is this this book is is so good. And like I said, it's it's a book that's not just about the in fact, there's only probably what 50 to 100 pages, if that, about the incident on the on the Roosevelt. The book is more about leadership and about pushing through change and about sort of the structure of how you where you start and where you can make those impacts. I mean, I stayed in the Navy nearly 30 years and I never gave up. And it was because I could always find, even in a command that wasn't maybe the best leadership or or whatever, there was always something. There was always something you could do. There was always a program that you could jump on, there was always a way that you could make your organization better and make an impact. And I believe that that's the the real thesis of your book is yeah, you have to find those programs and you have to find those places. One thing I did forget to ask you was about the 355 ship, and then we'll just close on that. How do you determine? Because I did look up how many ships we have now. We have about 290, and your one of your initiatives was that ship, you know, 355 goal. How does someone determine how many ships we're supposed to have? I mean, we're the largest navy in the the world, and what is it that's that comes into the calculus of saying, okay, we we need to have this number? I was really curious about that as I was reading.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:34

Okay, well, you'll be less impressed with this answer than you may have thought. So they, you know, they basically go out to the combat commanders and ask them, you know, what are their requirements for whatever contingencies that they're planning for, right? And then that generates numbers in terms of forces that they need to have, and then that those numbers get compiled. And when you compile all those numbers, like the numbers like 800 or something or 600 ships or whatever, which are not it's not feasible within the bunch of constraints that we have. And so the the Navy then looks at that, and or whoever, like think tanks or whatever, they look at it and they they they do their own assessments. They say, okay, well, we can address this requirement. You know, what are the odds that we're gonna need to have these all these requirements in play at one time? Not very well, but so which what can we compromise on here and there and whatever? And so that's how they that's basically how they come up with the number. And the number has always been aspirational because it's never been a number that we're budgeted for, you know, rarely ever budgeted for. And that was a great disappointment for me when I was there because the president ran on it, the Congress put it into law that that was the goal, and and there was never any money to to support it ever. And this sort of became very apparent towards the end of you know 2019, right around the time Secretary Spencer got fired. And I said, Well, I'm not gonna just sit here and continue to say that we're gonna build 355 unless we say we we need it, and and I think we need it, and I think we need to get the money for it. And so I got into some battles with Secretary Esper over this in terms of how much we needed just to get headed down the path. And a lot of this has to do with the number itself, the absolute number itself, is not really what's important, it's the delta that's important. If do you understand what I mean? So yeah, we were we were like at 300. And so when John Lehman built the 600 ship navy, they were we were we started out at like, I don't know, a little over 400 or something, and we added another 100 ships to get a little over a little over 100 ships to get to 600 ships. It was like a 16% increase in the size of the Navy. Well, everyone had been out there talking about you know, going from 300, 295 to 300 to 355. This is like a 35% increase in the Navy, and there was nothing in the budget or the planning to indicate that we were actually going to do that. And so I just, you know, I just couldn't keep that going. So I felt like I needed to be very vocal about it and try to get more money. And what I mean by the gap is that in order to be able to do that, in order to be able to build it, you have to have the capacity to build it. You have to have the shiploading capacity, the well, all the everything that's required to build it. Right now, we couldn't do it if we wanted to. We so I just wanted to have a large goal out there that, and I used to call it 355 plus too. That that wasn't I called it 355 plus because to me, the 355 battleships, battle force ships was one thing, but they needed to be augmented by a whole lot of unmanned stuff, massive increase in our cyber capability, all sorts of other things, not just the ships, not just the holes themselves. And so I used to call it 355 plus. And and my my view was that if you can get a commitment to that goal and get the money funded for it, the money will be there. The shipyards will start building towards that. And if they need to shift towards a different type of hull or whatever, at least they have the ability to do that. They have the capacity to do that. I always thought I we we had this thing called the the integrated force naval force structure assessment that was being led by uh Admiral Kilby at the time. And I I said it should be you know I squared NS N FSA because the second I should be iterative, which means that we have to we have to get into a situation where we can iterate often. That's the way the world is working right now, and it's gonna continue, nothing's gonna stop that. It's the ability to innovate and iterate your your force and so on and constantly. And if you don't have the infrastructure or the mentality to do that, you're not gonna be able to do it. If you look at what's happening in Ukraine, for example, with the drones, they are constantly having to iterate those things because the counter drone technology from the Russians or the other way around, they're really sending the same thing up over and over again because the AI that's being used in the field can recognize what's coming. And unless you do something to modify it or trick it, you're not you know, you're you're a sitting duck. So this was the whole point for me was like we start we have to start building this industrial capacity. We have to be able to iterate and innovate along that process along the same time. And frankly, I don't know that they've made a whole lot of progress. I I saw that the the FY27 shipbuilding budget is like 67 billion, up from like 24 billion last year. Well, that's that's great, but first of all, that's that's the president's budget request. I doubt seriously that the Congress is going to approve that, appropriate the funds for that. And the second thing is even if you turn did turn it on from 24 to 67 in one year, you don't have you know, you wouldn't be able to spend it. You just you don't have the capac, you don't have the capacity to spend it on anything. We're like a hundred and I think it's I saw the number the other day. It's like 140 or 150,000 open welding jobs in our shipbuilding industry right now that can't be full.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:56

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:56

Yeah. Wow. It's it's it's it's a pretty dire situation. And what I was trying to do with that 355 goal was like, all right, let's commit to this now and start ratcheting up. I only asked for five billion dollars more, and I believe it was for fiscal 20, fiscal 21 or 22. I think it was 21.$5 billion more just to get us down that path so we could start ratcheting it up. And I couldn't get Secretary Esper to to take anything from anybody to help us with that.

Where To Find The Book

SPEAKER_01 1:07:24

So well it's tough. I mean, this is this working in government is probably got to be like the toughest job uh out there, and and and really to be able to dig in there and and to make those changes. But the book, for those of you I've held it up a couple of times, is called Vectors, Heroes, Villains, and Heartbreak on the Bridge of the U.S. Navy, Thomas Modley. It is available on Amazon. Also, you have a website as well for your consulting firm, correct? I think I have it right here, uh Bellarock.com. That's where people can find you. You're also on LinkedIn. As we close down the call, was there anything else that I didn't ask you about that you wanted to mention to our audience?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:06

Now, a couple plugs about the book. If you it's also available on Audible, if you want to listen to my voice for 16 hours, you can do that. I did read it. So at least I can say I read the book. But but also Teresa meant you mentioned the the songs. I did a podcast with a friend of mine from the Naval Academy, a five-episode podcast that goes through all the music in the book. And so each each one-hour podcast takes five chapters. And we talk about the chapter, we talk about why I chose that particular song lyric for the beginning of the chapter. My friend Mike Keatings, he's uh my co-host on this. He's a classmate of mine from the academy. He's very knowledgeable about music and bands from the era that I chose, which is mostly 80s and 90s, 70s stuff. He talks a lot about the bands and you know what their influences were. And there's a lot of he has some interesting stories about them. And then we throw in some stories about our times at the Naval Academy and flight school and things like that. And so, yeah, so if you want to, you you literally could listen to that and really understand everything about the book. And then at the end of at the at the end of each episode, at the end of each chapter, we play the song. So if you if you subscribe to Spotify Prime or Premium, you can listen to the whole song as well if you if you want to hear it. So uh otherwise, it just plays like a little 15-second uh excerpt of the song, which may or may not hit the lyric.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:28

So awesome, awesome. Well, I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the Stories of Service broadcast. I'll meet you backstage just to say goodbye, real quick, but I will go full screen and say goodbye to my audience. All right, guys, thank you so much uh for joining us this week. I do have another show this Thursday. If you'd like to tune in at 8 p.m. CST, I'll be having on two military spouses who founded a series of retreats for other military spouses who are dealing with trauma and working on their healing journey. And they've just got a really great story to share, wonderful initiative within the military spouse community that I can't wait to tell you more about. But with that, as I always do, please take care of yourselves, please take care of each other. Enjoy the rest of your day. Have a great start to your week, and I'll talk to y'all later. Bye bye now.