This is John Batcher, a conversation with my colleagues Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang and Jim Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College, a professor, about the state of the Navy right now.

Jim answers Gordon directly, bottoming out. Why? He points to the Red Sea.

Here's Professor Jim Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College looking for recovery for the U.S. Navy in the years ahead.

More of this later this week.

And again, I'm somebody who is mostly here in Newport.

I don't get out into the fighting forces the way I would love to do. My sense, but again, my sense, my sense is I think we are doing better. I mean, and the one bit of evidence I would give you is just look at the performance of our ships in the red sea over the last few months.

I mean, I was talking about competence and I suggested and you seem to agree that our image for competence has taken a hit.

But at the same time, I think the performance of the destroyers of the carrier task forces and whatnot in the Red Sea,

I think they've helped start to to remedy those

perceptions something because I mean we've we've intercepted I don't know how many

drones and anti-ship crews of ballistic missiles and so forth and have not taken a

hit there there so far.

We haven't accomplished our mission there strategically, simply because the shipping continues to detour around

the into the South Atlantic rather than go through the Red Sea.

But on the tactical level, the

tacticians, the people we are talking about whose reputation for

competence matters, they have performed brilliantly. And so therefore, my

guess is that we've sort of bottomed out and are on the way up in terms of the fleet's

competence to perform its missions.