Operating in a Fiscally Constrained Environment

Everyone is keenly aware of the global financial crisis that all of our countries are currently contending with, and we've witnessed trillions of dollars being committed to trying to resolve this financial crisis that has so impacted the world.

This is a time when we believe that our military will be faced with budgetary challenges. We've seen this coming for some time as the country has committed a great deal in supplemental budgets, and so forth, to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we've known for some time, that some of the supplemental dollars would eventually diminish.

We are entering into that time and are going to tighten our belts with regard to the budgets that we have on hand. This is something that big Navy is facing. Our CNO is trying to judge how to balance his procurement of new equipment for our Navy, as well as his commitment to current readiness of our Navy, and I think on both sides of that balance we’re going to face a tightening of the budgets.

In the case of the readiness dollars that we manage here at Pacific Fleet, what I am committed to is the material health of our units. That is, our ships, our submarines, and our aircraft being well maintained, ready to sail and ready to fly. I'm committed to them being peopled correctly, and that is enough Sailors to maintain a ship, a submarine, to populate a squadron, such that from the standpoint of these two long lead time areas, that of manning and that of maintaining, that our fleet remains healthy.

If we're going to sacrifice anywhere it will be on the pace of operations, and that means that we perhaps will curtail some amount of flying or curtail some number of steaming days by our ships. Where that tends to impact us the most is in our training opportunities.

So, it becomes imperative for our commanders and for our Sailors to understand that with the time that they have at sea and the time they have opportunities to fly or to submerge in their submarines, they have to get the most out of the training opportunity that that represents. As well, we need to look at opportunities in port to train better and smarter, such that when we do go to sea we're going to sea for very specific reasons and to accomplish a great deal, and I think that the better prepared we are for that in our education and training beforehand, the more effective that we're going to be in being able to account for every flying hour and every steaming day.

So, I look forward to managing this process with all of our commanders out there, with my sub commanders, with the senior leadership in the Pacific Fleet. If we go through a period of very tight budgets, which we anticipate we will, we're going to have to work together to keep this fleet materially sound, well manned and operating as efficiently and effectively as we possibly can.