C-SPAN's live coverage of the president's trip to Israel and Egypt.
Coming up here around 2.15 p.m. Eastern Time, we're going to have live coverage of the Navy Anniversary commemoration ceremony celebrating America 250.
And that'll be right here on C-SPAN, online, on demand at C-SPAN.org.
Or you can download our free video mobile app, C-SPAN Now, and watch it there.
Ahead of our live coverage, we want to bring you back to the Washington Journal this morning, where we talked about the Navy anniversary.
And joining us now to discuss the Navy's 250th, it's Ryan Szymansky.
He's on board the USS New Jersey, where he serves as Deputy Executive Director of the Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial.
And Mr. Szymansky, on this semi-quincentennial, start by explaining what the American colonists were going up against when they decided 250 years ago to take on the British Navy.
The United States goes into the Revolution with no naval power at all, not a single armed warship in the colonies that belonged to the colonies.
The Royal Navy, on the other hand, was the largest and most powerful Navy in the world, with just under 1,000 combat ships able to deploy around the world.
These are all sailing warships, so they don't need fuel.
They can stay on station for years at a time.
And the one saving grace for the United States in this war is that the Royal Navy does have global commitments, so they can't concentrate all several hundred of those ships in colonial waters.
They have to be dispersed around the world.
And so you can thrive with the sort of hit-and-run attacks that the colonies were able to pull off during that war, both on land and at sea.
The colonies didn't have any warships, but they did have some very, very fast merchant vessels that were used to transport perishable goods.
So things like fruit coming out of the Caribbean.
Obviously, that's going to spoil very quickly unless you've got a fast sailing ship.
And the colonies did have, because the North American continent had a lot of lumber, they did have a very thriving shipbuilding industry and some very capable shipbuilders there.
And so they were building these fast ships.
And by taking some cannons from wherever you can get them, taking them out of British forts that you might have taken over, taking them from the French who might be willing to sell them to you because they're no friends of the British at this time.
And you put them on these fast ships and you can then use them essentially to raid British commerce, steal more goods off of British ships.
The United States, or what would become the United States Navy, the Continental Navy, was able to keep American supply lines open so that Washington's Army and the civilian population was still able to get goods from Europe and other countries that produce finished products that they weren't able to get in the colonies.
And at the same time, they were able to raid British shipping to the point that the British Army wasn't able to get all of the supplies that they needed to be able to march out of the cities like New York and Charleston where they were occupying and into the countryside where the colonists were.
And so they weren't able to project the power to actually defeat the American rebels at that time.
And that allowed the rebellion to continue to a victory.
The United States has not even entered World War II yet, and we're still in the middle of the Great Depression.
So from the very day that her keel is laid, this ship starts to serve her country by putting Americans back to work.
She's launched on December 7th, 1942, which is part of a national celebration where the United States launches on that weekend more ships than were lost at the attack on Pearl Harbor one year earlier.
She gets into the fight in 1943 and will serve through the end of World War II.
And then she's brought back again to fight in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Lebanese Civil War, and the later years of the Cold War under the Reagan administration.
Oh, yeah, the Navy has always had naming conventions for its ships.
Nowadays, the Secretary of the Navy gets to present the names.
He asks a group of folks in the Navy Department called Naval History and Heritage Command, and he says, Hey, I want to name this ship after a person.
Can you give me a list of famous people?
Or I want to name it after a very successful former ship.
Can you give me a name, a list of names of those ships that aren't currently in service?
And so Naval History and Heritage Command presents him with a list.
He picks his favorites.
And typically, the conventions are true for certain types of ships.
So for battleships, the convention has always been to name them after states.
There was one, battleship number five, USS Kearsarge, which was named after a famous Civil War-era warship.
But the other ones were all named after states with smaller ships named after smaller communities.
So cruisers, which is the next size down, would be named after cities.
Destroyers, the next size down from that, are named for naval heroes, people, essentially.
Submarines was fun during World War II.
They were all named after fish.
Nowadays, those conventions have changed with aircraft carriers often named after political heroes, usually presidents.
You see destroyers still named after heroes.
Cruisers tend to be named after battles.
And the battleship names, since state names, there aren't any battleships anymore to get the state names, those go towards the submarines, which are the new ship, the new premier anti-warship ship of the Navy.
They can sink other ships better than anyone else.
New Jersey was a massively expensive ship to build and to operate.
In the 1980s, they calculated that it cost a million dollars a day to operate a single battleship.
And that's not adjusted for inflation.
That was great during World War II.
We had an all-draft military.
We could throw as many bodies at the ship as we needed to man her.
Nowadays, we have an all-volunteer military, so there are fewer members of the armed forces.
So you can't put as many people on a single ship.
Likewise, battleships are designed to carry large guns.
They can shoot over 20 miles and to have heavy armor to take hits from enemy guns.
Well, we don't really use guns for surface combat anymore.
We've got missiles that can shoot hundreds or even thousands of miles.
And armor doesn't really do as much against missiles.
So having an armored ship or a gunship doesn't make sense in the modern Navy.
Plus, you don't want a single large expensive ship carrying all of your missiles.
If that ship gets taken out, that's all the ammunition that your fleet had to throw back at the enemy.
So the modern Navy uses something called distributed lethality, where they distribute its missiles to a bunch of smaller, faster ships that are harder to hit.
And if, God forbid, one does get damaged, now we've lost a quarter of our missiles instead of all of the missiles.
This is one of my favorite spaces on the battleship.
We're in a room called the Combat Engagement Center.
It was installed in 1982 in the space that had originally been the Admiral's Cabin.
So this is where Admirals like Halsey and Spruance lived when they served on this battleship in 1982.
Or excuse me, during World War II.
In the 1980s, the battleship was old, obsolete, had old radios, things like that.
So she didn't make a good flagship for admirals to command an entire fleet.
So they got rid of that entire room and they brought in all of the Star Wars-looking equipment that's in here now.
So, this space now controls all of the modern radars and all of the modern missile systems that were grafted onto this ancient battleship in the 1980s.
This is something that still holds dearly to my heart.
My father and uncle fought in the Korean War.
They were on the USSR Klondike.
And I can remember as a child how honor it was to see our family members come home that were still with us because sometimes we may have lost family members during that time.
And I just think that I have a long line of military, actually every branch.
And I would just say thank you, thank you, thank you to our fallen soldiers.
I thank my father and my uncle, my father, Frank James Stalker, and my uncle, Donald Buchanan.
And I would like to thank you very much for being on here this morning.
It still holds a touch to my heart.
One of my favorite songs is the national anthem.
My question is to you.
Where in the future are we seeing our Navy going?
I would like to see more of our Americans go into the Navy.
The Navy really wasn't a branch that was really talked a lot about back then, but our boys on that water, they took care of business.
So where is our Navy, part of the military branch, probably going in the future?
Ryan Symansky, before you answer, I'll show this op-ed from today's Washington Post, Stephen Flynn on the Navy's 250th calling for a celebration with a shipbuilding revival for the United States Navy.
Thanks for coming on and asking, and thank you for your family service.
So the Navy was the largest, the American Navy was the largest one in the world from about 1943, 1944, up until the early 2010s when the Chinese Navy surpassed us in size.
One place where the Navy needs to go in the future is to a larger fighting force so that we can deploy more ships than the Chinese.
The other thing that the Navy is going to do more of in the future is produce more unmanned craft so that we're not putting as many Americans in risk when we go into combat zone.
So I could easily see the Navy growing in size over the next couple of decades and a lot of that growth coming from unmanned vessels and aircraft.
So we have 11 aircraft carriers, but for every three aircraft carriers that we have, there's only one that can be actively deployed because one will be undergoing training and one will be undergoing maintenance.
So 11 aircraft carriers really only means three or four that can be deployed somewhere in the world.
China exclusively deploys its warships in the Pacific Ocean.
The United States deploys its warships worldwide.
And so while we do have four deployable aircraft carriers at any time, some of them are in the Indian Ocean, some of them are in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic.
So the Chinese have more aircraft carriers than we have deployed in the Pacific at any given time.
Oh, Old Ironsides is the nickname of USS Constitution.
She is the oldest commissioned warship in the U.S. Navy and the only commissioned warship in the U.S. Navy that has sunk an enemy warship.
Constitution was built in 1797 as one of the first six frigates for the United States Navy.
So the U.S. had the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War.
In between the Revolutionary War and the signing of the Constitution and George Washington's presidency, all of the surviving Continental ships are transferred back to civilian use to be used as merchant ships again.
And so in the 1790s, early 1800s, when American trade starts to get preyed upon by pirates and during the naval combat that's happening in Europe because of the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution, the U.S. Navy has no way of protecting its trade.
And so President Washington commissions the building of six new frigates.
Constitution is one of them.
And because of her service during the War of 1812, where she wins a number of battles against British warships, she has been preserved today, just like Battleship New Jersey, as a museum ship that the public can come out and visit.
But unlike New Jersey, she is still an active Navy vessel with a Navy crew.
Today, the battleship has free admission, so visitors in the Camden, Philadelphia area can come on board and visit us for free.
We also have active Navy ships tied up alongside of us and all around us.
So if you want to see both an older historic vessel like Battleship New Jersey or a modern frontline state-of-the-art warship, you can come on board and get free tours of either.
By an act of Congress, when New Jersey was taken out of naval service and they decided that she was historic enough to be turned into a museum ship, they decided that she was going to be placed somewhere in the territorial waters of her home state, the state of New Jersey.
And so several cities in and around New Jersey submitted applications to the Navy that they were the perfect home site for this vessel.
And it ended up being the city of Camden that submitted the winning application to get the ship.
One of the reasons why Camden's application was so successful is because Camden is right across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
And the battleship was not only built in Philadelphia in the 1940s, but she also spent some of her career here being fixed up and repaired at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
So she has a big history with this part of the world.
And we know that at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, there is a dry dock that's big enough to repair this ship.
So the Navy looked at Camden as being a good long-term steward of its historical asset because we have the ability to repair her here much more easily than other places in New Jersey.
Oh, Midway is one of my favorite aircraft carriers.
She is also saved as a museum ship.
If you go to San Diego, you can take a tour of her, too.
By size, she's probably the largest museum ship anywhere in the world.
Midway was commissioned in October 1945, right as World War II was ending, and she served continuously straight up through the Gulf War and wasn't decommissioned until the late 90s or early 2000s.
And last year, she celebrated her 20th year as a museum.
So really fantastic ship to go and visit, because not only do you get to walk around a ship like you do here on Battleship New Jersey, but they also have a number of historic aircraft in the ship's hangar and on the flight deck that you can see.
I'm from Maryland originally, and so my home state battleship, BB-46, USS Maryland, is a Colorado-class battleship.
Colorado was BB-45.
USS Colorado was built in 1920, right after World War I, and she was the most modern ship in the fleet when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
A much smaller battleship than New Jersey.
Because she was 20 years older, she still had 16-inch guns.
She had eight 16-inch guns.
And the U.S. Navy used her basically like a siege engine throughout World War II.
They would take her and the other older, they call them slow battleships, because they weren't as fast as the modern fast battleships like the Iowa class.
So the fast battleships go with the aircraft carriers and hunt Japanese carriers.
The slow battleships serve as siege engines and would make a ring around the Japanese islands that we're trying to capture and just bombard those beaches.
Our 16-inch guns and Colorado 16-inch guns can fire projectiles that weigh more than one ton.
And so when they hit the ground and explode, they make a hole that's about 50 feet wide and 30 feet deep.
I think you would definitely have to have John Paul Jones.
He's considered by many to be the father of the American Navy.
So he would probably be the first head on there.
From World War II, I love Admiral Halsey.
I love Admiral Spruance, but you'd probably have to pick Admiral Chester Nimitz as the person that you would represent from that war.
He led the Pacific Fleet throughout and was Halsey and Spruance's boss.
Stephen Decatur would be one of my picks.
During the War of 1812, he was probably the most successful of the American Admirals.
There weren't admirals yet, Commodores of the American Commodores.
And then George Dewey, who sailed on the cruiser Olympia, which is a museum ship in Philadelphia, he was the admiral that won the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War.
And that was really when the U.S. Navy transitions from being an old colonial wooden navy to a modern, imperial, worldwide transiting steel, steam-powered navy.
As we show our viewers some of the gun turrets of the USS New Jersey in your naval history there, fast forward about four score and seven or eight years to another famous quote by a member of the Navy: Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead.
Oh, Admiral Farragut, who if we could add a fifth head on Mount Rushmore, would definitely be the guy there.
He's the first American to earn the rank of admiral.
And he served during the American Civil War.
And he was tasked with capturing Mobile Bay.
The problem is Mobile Bay is defended by fixed fortifications and what were then called torpedoes, what we would now call sea mines.
So they're stationary powder charges in the water.
You can't see them because they're underwater.
And when an American ship would sail under them, they would explode, sinking the ship.
So conventional wisdom held that sailing ships could not defeat fixed fortifications.
Sailing ships are dependent on the wind, and because the wind is moving them, their guns are less accurate than the fixed fortifications of land.
And plus, those mines are going to destroy any ships that sail under them.
Farragut's ships might have been wooden and they might have carried sails for the most part, but they had steam engines.
So he was able to sail straight into Mobile Bay, Alabama, past the Confederate fortifications, through the minefield, and get behind the Confederate fortifications, and then they weren't doing any good because their guns were fixed.
They were only pointing to seaward.
So by being really that first person who was bold enough to say, hey, conventional wisdom says that ships can't beat forts, but I'm going to take my whole fleet through there.
And he does lose ships to those mines.
USS Tecumseh, an ironclad monitor, is sunk.
He still sails straight through that, defeats the Confederate ironclad, defeats the fortifications, and captures the city, which essentially shuts down Confederate river-borne commerce and cuts off the Eastern Confederacy from the West, Texas, and those sorts of states where a lot of the goods needed for Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia were coming from.
Just about 15 minutes left with Ryan Symansky this morning on the 250th birthday of the United States Navy.
This is Samuel on that line for former military out of South Pasadena, California.
Good morning.
unidentified
Go ahead.
Good morning.
Yes, I wanted to talk to you about this.
I was on the Jersey in 1983 when we left San Diego for Lebanon.
And that's when they bombed the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.
We got there, we had loaded, we were 20 miles off the coast, and we shot those 16-inch guns.
We put a lot of holes out there, about 30-foot circle, about 20 to 30-foot deep.
And I went with a crew of eight other sailors, and we were there just to go and get the bodies, rescue the bodies and everything from the Marine, the barracks there.
But there were also 12 Navy SHILs on that ship, too.
And they took their zodiacs out there because a little bit outside of Beirut, there was a little place there where a lot of people, innocent people were there where the Navy SHILS came in and they secured the area, killing the enemy and bringing out the innocent.
I remember taking that ship from San Diego to Lebanon.
We went through the Panama Canal, 972 feet long, USS New Jersey, BB-62, battle bombardment, and 105 feet wide.
And we were scraping going through that Panama Canal because that Panama Canal wasn't that wide, but that ship barely made it through there.