I'm John Batscher with my colleague,

Captain Jerry Hendrix, US Navy Retired Aviator,

Sagamore Institute.

We're speaking to the ability of the U.S. Navy to project power and maintain the sea

lanes, in particular the very enclosed space of the Red Sea, from harassment and damage by the Houthi group militants supplied by Iran.

The question, however, is how long can this be sustained and what does the future look like?

The U.S. Navy right now is the marshal on the planet, and this speaks to the industrial strategy, a new document from the Department of Defense, the

National Defense Industrial Strategy.

And Jerry, Admiral Savridis speaks very well of this document.

You and I have not exchanged thoughts on it. You've been speaking carefully for a long time about the industrial base.

Is the DoD now ready to put money into it and to develop what we need to generate the fleet that we need for the future?

Well, John, I think that we have to characterize this document as honestly you can. The DoD has

begun to pay attention to its industrial base in depth and in breadth. They've begun to effectively do an inventory on what's available

in the industrial base across the United States and even looking at our close allies and

partners and then finding how deep that industrial base is, how many shifts

are being operated by individual factories that make key components associated with us.

So having that list is an important first step,

but ultimately it will not be the Department of Defense

that decides to expand the industrial base.

It will be the administration in cooperation with the Congress

to actually begin to put money against that. Now what I will say is that in the past several years and I think going back probably four or five

years Department of Defense officials from both parties have gone up to Capitol

...