Captain Jim Fennell

And we're not just going to have ships that go to sea that just protect themselves by shooting down incoming missiles.

So for the last 35 years, we've been focused on power projection ashore in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then this kind of defense, you know, defending against incoming air launch missiles.

But we haven't really thought about what does it mean to go after other Navy fleets, because there hadn't been a peer competitor naval fleet since the Soviet Navy went away when the Soviets collapsed in 1991.

So we've been 35 years, 34 years of not having a peer competitor.

But in that time, the PRC, the People's Liberation Army Navy, has built themselves into a peer competitor.

And what I heard tonight was a president who's preaching from the bully pulpit, as we've been asking for.

And then what's different than his first administration, I think he had the same desires in his first administration, but he didn't have a team.

He didn't have the right people around him and they were not able to execute.

They did some things.

They reversed the decline that Obama had really done and Biden continued.

They stopped that in his first administration.

But I think now,

They've spent the last 10 months with this Office of Shipbuilding and these new plans for these new systems and this outlook of, hey, we have to fight and win wars at sea.

And I was very glad to hear the comments about survivability, fighting and winning, shooting the archer, not just swatting down arrows.

The idea that we're going to build and continue to build aircraft carriers was also very welcome to my ears, along with these battleships.

And he used the phrase,

battle groups.

You know, when you were in the Navy and when I joined the Navy, we had carrier battle groups, CVBGs.

And in 2004, when I was on board the USS Kitty Hawk out in Japan, the U.S.