I'm John Batscher with Jim Talent, former senator from Missouri now, Chairman of the National Leadership Council at the Reagan Institute and Jerry Hendrix retired US Navy Captain Aviator, a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute, War Fighting.

Jerry, I start with you because right now the war fighting requires a fleet that we can only

imagine in the Pacific the first island chain the second island chain is that the

Navy's opinion that they have sufficient ships now to rally in the event of a Taiwan tragedy?

Yes, I believe the Navy would say that yes, it does have sufficient capability.

However, those of us who look carefully at the numbers have significant questions about that.

The Navy said that if we took everything that's in the Pacific and we flooded into the region,

effectively we could have a majority of the combatant fleet in and around

the Western Pacific First Island Chain at the end of two weeks, which is sort of our rolling

start methodology.

However, looking at the readiness numbers,

you know, for instance, right now, we've had three aircraft carriers at sea.

That is three of the operating 10,

because there's always one in the yards having its nuclear

reactors refuel. So that's 30% of the force that's been forward deployed now. The

ford's been extended. She is on her way home, but you also have the Eisenhower and the Stennis

have been at sea. Reagan is sortied a couple of times. That means that we

burned a lot of readiness in the carrier strike groups. If I look at the

cruisers, well we had 22 Tychana rugger cruisers. We've retired five or seven of them now and we're going to retire a bunch more this year.

That's a significant amount of missile tubes in the inventory that's going away.

Our Burke class are getting quite old.

The flight ones are reaching nearly 40 years of age.

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