Donald J. Trump

It's how we acquire things and our success in doing it.

We need a rickover.

Yeah, Admiral Masso, this is the thing.

We talked about Rick over earlier in the film that I made with Michael Pack.

You can't do it with 290 capital ships, right?

You've already made that case.

You've got a structure and a force structure and a fighting philosophy built around the Kerry battle group.

But given the fact we have had so many failures with the littoral ship, with the Zumwalt class, right?

I mean, how do you convince—

Has the Trump administration convinced Congress that we have to go through a massive shipbuilding upgrade?

Because you were there.

You and I were shipmates.

You were there and you went back to the Pentagon during the when I think we had under 200 ships.

We came out of the fleet and built up to a 600 ship Navy.

How do you convince Congress and the American people to underwrite that bill, sir?

Well, I think we have to—it begins with really articulating the threat, the threat of hypersonic missiles, the threat of the changing nature of even what we've created in our Missile Defense Agency, where we focused intensely on midcourse and terminal phase intercept.

And I think that the lessons that we're learning today in terms of technological advancements, specifically in China, centers around we're going to have to be better at intelligence and reconnaissance, early warning detections, things of this nature, and that maybe it's not a missile intercept, it's a strike.

you know, that comes from our aircraft carrier.

So I'm not one that believes unilaterally that our aircraft carriers are obsolete by a long shot.

But I do know that we need to refine our tactics, techniques, and procedures