Maritime leaders discuss the Navy’s heading at Sea Air Space 2025

• The Navy League’s Sea Air Space 2025 expo saw maritime leaders discuss recent successes and areas for improvement. Adm. James Kilby met with the media, taking questions and moderating a panel.
• The Navy seeks 80% readiness across its fleet forces, with some progress being made towards that number.
• Discussions are ongoing about cost-effective measures to counter the threats posed by cheap drones like those being used by non-state actors.

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Gathering America’s maritime leadership in one place can be challenging due to the demands of their various jobs. This difficulty underscores the importance of the annual Sea Air Space event.

Acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby met with the media and moderated a panel with five Navy commanders. They addressed recent successes and areas needing improvement as the Navy continues to modernize in the face of growing threats.

Questions about readiness

Amid the pomp and circumstance typical of the Navy League’s Sea Air Space event, Adm. Kilby and five of his operational and systems commanders faced numerous questions. One prominent question was about the Navy’s progress toward its goal of 80% combat surge readiness.

In 2018, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis instructed the Navy to improve its F/A-18 Super Hornet fleet, increasing the number of ready jets from 250 to 341. The Navy revamped its maintenance practices and achieved the target.

“The truth is, it took well over a year to get there, and now to sustain it takes an all-hands effort all the time with the naval aviation enterprise, op, nav, sec, nav staff, the whole team. It’s pretty exciting,” Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever said.

Inspired by this success, other parts of the Navy, including surface and submarine forces, also began changing their maintenance and logistics to boost readiness. The numbers show progress, with aircraft carriers closest to the goal at 70%, while submarines and surface warships are at 67% and 68%, respectively.

One of the biggest hurdles facing Kilby and Navy leadership is two-fold, too many boats still in the production pipeline or needing long-term maintenance.

“The last part is partnering with industry, which we hear here too,” Vice Adm. Brendan McLane said. “We cannot do it by ourselves. I meet with industry weekly to discuss which avails are not going well, and the path that my predecessor, Adm. Kitchener, started with our north star of 75 mission-capable ships has segued very well into our 80% combat surge readiness goal.”

What about aircraft?

After the opening panel, Adm. Kilby stepped away from the festivities to field questions from a select group of media attendees. He covered a wide range of topics, but one was at the top of the list.

“Speaking of timelines and things that the service branch needs, do you have any update on F/A-XX and how that’s going?” Weapons and Warfare host Ryan Robertson asked.

“Yeah, I do not want to get ahead of the contract decision, but I will tell you, we need facts in the United States Navy, just like the Air Force does,” Adm. Kilby explained. “I mean, we’re talking about a fight in the Pacific. We fight together as a joint force, so having that capability is very important for us.”

“What is left to be done before the contract decision is announced?” Robertson asked. “There were rumors it was going to get announced a couple of weeks ago. What is the Navy waiting on?”

“It’s a decision at the Secretary level and above, and they are working on that now,” Adm. Kilby replied.

Making cost-effective measures

Another area of conversation was how to handle the threat of the Houthis and other non-state actors in a cost-effective manner, particularly the drone threat posed by anyone with a little money.

“As a former N9 (Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfighting Requirements and Capabilities), I focused on a high-end laser, 500 kilowatts to one megawatt,” Adm. Kilby continued. “I regret that I had not been thoughtful enough to consider the UAV threat, where I think a much lesser power weapon would have done what we needed. We are putting capabilities on the Ford Strike Group. It will be a much more cost-effective way to deal with the UAV threat in particular. But we have to address the industrial base, or munitions industrial base, in the same manner we address our shipbuilding industrial base to increase more munitions.”

When pressed on the subject of lasers as a solution, the admiral said it is the kind of investment that needs to be fully fleshed out.

“I do not want to abandon it, but I am not ready to go all in yet on buying these things until I can have a relatively sure output in action,” he stated.

To highlight the problem, in January, Vice Adm. Brendan McLane, the head of Naval Surface Forces, told attendees of the Surface Navy Association Conference that over the previous 15 months, the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet launched nearly 400 munitions in their fight against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.

This included 120 SM-2 missiles at a cost of $1.2 million each, 80 SM-6 missiles at $4 million each, along with a total of 20 Evolved SeaSparrow Missiles and SM-3 missiles, a number likely costing in the nine-digit range.

Access the full Weapons and Warfare episode here.

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