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Navy secretary nominee John Phelan has no military experience, but he was speaking the language Thursday during his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill.
He called “people our most precious resource,” vowing to “restore operational readiness” as the Navy faces “an inflection point” with China’s growing naval power outpacing the U.S.’s ability to put more ships in the water.
“I understand that some may question why a businessman who did not wear the uniform should lead the Navy. I respect that concern,” Phelan, 60, a career investment banker and Trump-campaign donor, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The Navy and the Marine Corps already possess extraordinary operational expertise within their ranks. My role is to utilize that expertise and strengthen it to step outside the status quo and take decisive action with a results-oriented approach.”
Despite being new to the Navy, Phelan came prepared to discuss the department’s perennial issues, vowing to bringing his business experience to bear on underresourced shipyards and shipbuilding cost overruns.
The nominee also pledged to turn his attention to the health, welfare, and training of sailors and Marines and “fostering an adaptive, accountable, and innovative warfighter culture.”
“The president has been very consistent when he spoke with me: shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding,” Phelan said.
The president is also pretty concerned about photos of rusty ships he’s seen posted on social media.
“I jokingly say that President Trump has texted me numerous times very late at night – sometimes after one in the morning – [pictures] of rusty ships or ships in a yard, asking me, what am I doing about it? And I’ve told him, ‘I’m not confirmed yet and have not been able to do anything about it, but I will be very focused on it.’”
The Navy has already proposed a plan to tackle its maintenance problems with a new schedule that sees ships in the yards more often and for shorter periods of time.
Phelan suggested he’d like to gather some “best practices” from domestic and foreign shipyards to help new construction go more smoothly as well. That might involve renegotiating some existing contracts, including the Columbia-class submarine program, to create more competition among defense firms.
“I’m candidly fearful of what I’m going to find when I read some of these contracts and get in there, in terms of their [favor] to the private-sector side, but we need to go in there, take a look at them,” he said.
It’s fine for defense contractors to turn a profit, he said, but that profit should be commensurate with the amount of risk they’re taking on when developing new technology.
Resourcing shipyards will be a key factor to improving the industrial base, and multiple senators voiced their concerns with the Pentagon’s plan to cut 5 to 8 percent of its civilian workforce – up to 61,000 employees.
Phelan said that, if confirmed, he intends to sit down with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to discuss how personnel cuts would affect the Navy’s and Marine Corps’ priorities.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., noted that Portsmouth Naval Shipyard needs to hire 550 workers a year to keep pace with the Navy’s submarine-repair needs, and a reduction in personnel could severely hamper that effort.
“It’s interesting, because the Department of Defense announced a few days ago that 5,400 probationary employees would be fired without any real analysis of the need,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the committee’s ranking member said.
U.S. law precludes reductions in DOD’s civilian workforce “unless the Secretary conducts an appropriate analysis of the impacts of such reductions on workload, military force structure, lethality, readiness, operational effectiveness, stress on the military force, and fully burdened costs,” Reed added.
Phelan pledged to follow the law when carrying out Hegseth’s orders. When Reed asked whether he would provide SASC with documentation to support a completed, thorough review, the nominee stopped short.
“Senator, I will follow all laws that exist,” Phelan said. “I assume you guys get that documentation.”
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