This is John Bachelor, conversation with my good friend Jerry Hendrix, Captain Jerry Hendrix,

author of to provide and maintain a Navy why Naval Promises America's first best strategy. Jerry again makes the keen point.

Planning ahead means that we need more submarines, more attack submarines,

but especially the Ohio-class missile boats, four of them, loaded with

Tomahawk missiles. That is the offense.

Jerry Hendrix, Captain Jerry Hendrix, United States Navy

aviator asking asking for replacement for the Ohio-class missile

boats now carrying hundreds of tomahawks. And a lot more besides the submarine fleet is the winner. More of

this later. The four Ohio-class SSNs or guided missile submarines are

going to retire in the next 10 years and we have no replacement for them which means we're going to lose some 600 tomahawk missiles

in our submarine inventory over the next 10 years.

I'd like to replace all of those tomahawk missiles

underwater with more of them.

And so I would like to build more fast attack submarines, but I would also replace those guided missile submarines as well.

That gives us that war-winning lethality that we need that's survivable that can penetrate deep into these anti-access air denial

environments but it the unmanned is really sort of the critical pivot

point right now because that's where I can actually grow the fleet perhaps not as substantially more at cost.

It will cost more overall, but not as much more if I wanted to grow to a 456 ship fleet just

with all manned.

And so unmanned sort of gives me a way of keeping

some of my costs down going forward.

And that's the reason I drew up this matrix.

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