Q & A - ADM. JONATHAN W. GREENERT, USN
There’s a challenge I’ve been staring at called quality of service. When I ask sailors how personal readiness can be improved, they say they need better tools, more spare parts, and more unit and professional training. They want to stop gaps occurring in supervisors. They want barracks improved because, with sequestration, shore-facility maintenance has been deferred.
Quality of life, their compensation, is good, and they admit it. But that quality of work is out of balance. So, all the money the Navy would realize from compensation reform would go for those things, including barracks, training, tools, spare parts, and also career sea pay and other incentives.
Some in Congress are inclined to wait for the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission to make its report in February 2015 before approving compensation changes. What’s wrong with that?
We have a budget challenge right now. If we wait a year, we defer those savings. Also, if these don’t work as we thought, we can adjust the pay raise and [Basic Allowance for Housing] and even commissary reforms. We seek a more efficient commissary, not to put those savings on the backs of customers. We shouldn’t have our people endure the burden of an attempt to make the commissaries more efficient. If that were to occur, we could adjust. These are adjustable every year. But waiting puts off the ability to reap savings, and that would cascade through future budgets.
The House Armed Services Committee chair, in rejecting these changes, said if Obama wants to cap the pay raise at 1 percent it’s his choice, but the committee won’t trim money for Basic Allowance for Housing or make changes to TRICARE. If the Senate does the same, how would the Navy accommodate the resulting hole in budget savings?
The quality-of-service improvements I described won’t happen. I will back those out of the budget, except for career sea pay because it’s important to acknowledge and reward duty at sea. We also should acknowledge and compensate for tempo of deployments, so we are working to bake that initiative into the budget. I still need to work on that.
For more than a year after the BCA, Congress failed to reach a balanced plan on deficit reduction to avoid sequestration. You and the other chiefs warned them not to allow this to take effect, yet it has. Are you done arguing for relief from the BCA ceilings?
We have put together a budget that shows the impact of a BCA-level top line through the future defense budget plan. That’s the alternative we testified to it. For the Navy, it means retiring, rather than [overhauling], aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73). We also lose two destroyers and a submarine. Shipbuilding would be devastated. We would lose a shipbuilder or two. I’ve already told you of the impact on four missions.
We also provided a higher top line to build the ’15 budget, which we submitted to Capitol Hill and showed what it gets us. It’s obviously a much more capable military for meeting defense strategic guidance and Quadrennial Defense Review requirements. So, as we testified, it’s a matter of what the nation wants its naval force to be able to do.
You have spoken of the importance of naval presence, having enough ships and also international partners to allow ships to be based forward. How is the fleet sized today to meet requirements for naval presence?
Under the president’s budget and future planning, we would have a presence on the low end of adequate to meet requirements. We have 289 ships. That would grow to 306 ships around the end of the decade.
56 MILITARY OFFICER JULY 2014
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