Donald J. Trump

Captain, for now, I've got a question.

Sonny Masso just laid out that the 290 capital ships built around 11, I think, aircraft carriers for carrier strike groups or carrier battle groups.

It's a traditional way the United States Navy has fought basically since World War II when we won the war in the Pacific against the Imperial Japanese Navy based around not the battleship but based around the aircraft carrier and naval air.

Is that – we're going to have Morgan on here for a second.

He's talking about drones, but then he got the Chinese Communist Party and all the weapons they have close in off of the coast of China, which Taiwan is only 90 miles away.

We talk about fighting our way across the Pacific and trying to have to – Cleo keeps telling us, hey, we're letting the Chinese Communist Party take those islands that the Marines – the Marine Corps fought for and the Navy fought for in World War II.

But isn't the concept of the carrier battle group the reason that the cost of the Navy is so expensive of capital ships and what we're trying to do?

And is it a relic from time gone by?

Is it time to rethink fundamentally the basic warfighting capability of the United States and what makes the most sense, particularly since we're pivoting now to hemispheric defense where we need expeditionary strike capability throughout the world, sir?

Well, Steve, there's an old saying, it's called a bird in the hand as we're two in the bush.

So before we start cutting away the carriers, we need to make sure that we have something reliable to restore to or to turn to.

In World War II, we relied before the Japanese struck us on 7 December 1941, the principal platform of the U.S.

Navy was the battleship.

And after our battleships were sunk, we switched

and started focusing on carriers, and that's where we've been, as you said, for the last 80 years.

The Pacific, as we talked earlier, is 17 times the size of continental United States.

It takes over almost 12 days steaming at 20 knots for one carrier to just high-speed transit across the center of the Pacific without stopping 24-7, which never happens.

So it's a big, big ocean, and we need to be able to bring forces to bear

to get the kinds of power projection effects that we want, whether it's to stop an invasion or to stop something else that the Chinese are doing or drug cartels or anything else.

And we can't do that if we don't have platforms that can sustain combat power over long duration.