This is John Batchelor, conversation with Tom Maudley, former acting secretary of the Navy,

about the proposal in the 27 budget for the fleet to grow. What will it look like? The

metaphor is used the golden fleet. What mix? And where and when and how much? Tom gives us an

overview of the golden fleet, but what about the retirements

in the meantime? Here's Tom Motley to explain. The Navy will grow. Sooner is better. Much more

tonight. Tom Motley.

That's interesting, John, because I haven't seen, I've seen different numbers on what this Golden Fleet is supposed to look like.

And obviously, these are all in support of the Golden Fleet concept that the President

has put forward and Secretary Phelan has put forward.

I haven't seen a long-term plan in terms of force mix,

nor how these numbers fit into the five-year defense plan, which would tell you, is this a one-time

hit, or is this going to be continued year after year? Are they going to continue to scale up?

And the other thing that's missing from this in terms of the information I've seen is how does this match up with the retirements of existing ships?

Obviously, we have to retire ships every year because they get too old to service.

They've reached their service lives.

And so they're constantly doing that.

When I was in the department, we were making hard choices about whether or not to retire

certain ships that were before their expected service life because we just couldn't afford

to maintain them anymore and continue to invest in new ships.

I don't see that trade-off being made here.

I think this is a very aggressive attempt to increase the size of the fleet.

But I haven't seen anything about retirements.

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