WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) participated in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today to consider the nomination of Admiral Daryl Caudle to be Chief of Naval Operations. During the hearing, Sen. Tuberville and Admiral Caudle discussed the need to work with our allies as we work to improve our U.S. Naval capabilities, as well as the advantages of using unmanned vessels at sea.
Excerpts from the interview can be found below and the full interview can be viewed on YouTube or Rumble.
ON SHIPBUILDING WITH OUR ALLIES:
TUBERVILLE: “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Admiral, congratulations. You’ve earned this. Looking forward to working with you. You know, we talk about shipbuilding, and we do a lot of that in my state of Alabama.
Now, we’re in the submarine business. But I was also in the education business. We’re 500,000 electricians short in this country. In mine and your lifetime, we can’t catch up. We’re gonna have to use our allies to help build some things.
What’s your thoughts about that? And, for instance, [South] Korea, they build 5 to our 1 keels. [What] are your thoughts on helping and working with our allies to help build ships in the future?”
CAUDLE: “Well, Senator, thanks for meeting with me. I enjoyed our time in your office. I wanna work with the Secretary of the Navy and the Department of Defense on looking at this hard. Again, I’ve said this is an all hands on deck [effort]. I don’t know how we do what we need to do without bringing international partners into the capacity problem that we have, while we build up our capacity because we need ships today.
And, so, there are no magic beans to that. There’s nothing that’s just gonna make that happen. So, the solution space has got to open up. And I think part of that has to look at international partnerships to give us a little bit of a relief valve while we work on our own organic industrial capacity.”
TUBERVILLE: “As you said, we need them yesterday. And again, this education problem is not going away. Our workforce problem is not going away. We gotta use the best that we know how. And we gotta build ships and we gotta build them fast. But they gotta be good ships, and I think working with our allies is gonna be one way for us to address this problem.”
ON SAIL DRONES:
TUBERVILLE: “What’s your thoughts on unmanned vessels like sail drones that we make in our state of Alabama. Are you familiar with those?”
CAUDLE: “Senator, I am familiar with them. Those are type of technologies that are crucial. Sail drones are part of the fabric of how we improve our Maritime Domain Awareness. You’ve, I’m sure, heard of the instantiations we’ve had with our Task Force 59 in the Arabian Gulf using those type of technologies. We’ve had them in the Gulf of America with our southern border watch. We’re using them there with [U.S.] Fourth Fleet and other places. So, yes, that’s a part of exactly what we need to network persistent capabilities where I don’t want manned vessels spending time just collecting things that unmanned can do much more affordably and effectively.”
TUBERVILLE: “Yeah. Those have been used well down in the Caribbean on the war on drugs. And we’re proud of how they worked, and we need to continue to expand that there. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. A lot of eyes out there that we don’t have to man [with] people and train people, but it’s good that you go along with it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”
Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans’ Affairs, HELP and Aging Committees.
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