Navy acquisition chief James Geurts at the commissioning ceremony of USS Tulsa

WASHINGTON: The Biden team is making a clean break at the top of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, with Navy acquisition chief James Geurts joining Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite in leaving the building by Jan. 20.

Geurts, who was actually approved by the Senate in Dec. 2017 — something of a rarity in the Trump Pentagon, largely populated by “acting” officials — oversaw the slow and grinding evolution of a slew of Navy programs that had long since blown through their budgets, and were years behind schedule. 

The Littoral Combat Ship, Ford-class aircraft carriers and Zumwalt destroyers had been mismanaged long before the new team moved into their offices with the Trump administration, but after four years, their path forward remains unclear. 

A retired Air Force officer who also served as the top acquisition executive for Special Operations Command, Geurts has been at the forefront of the Navy’s push for unmanned ships. He has also championed the standup of 15 “tech bridges” across the country to spur innovation among small companies to help the Navy modernize.

Geurts will likely be replaced by his deputy, Frederick Stefany, on an acting basis until the Biden administration names a permanent replacement.

The Trump years were rocky for the Navy, which saw the firing of secretary Richard Spencer in Nov. 2019 after he got crosswise with the president over the pardoning of a Navy SEAL charged with war crimes. Just a few months later, in April 2020, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly flamed out over his handling of the COVID outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

The larger problems the Navy has not been able to solve, namely multiple acquisition failures on every new class of ship it has tried to build over the past two decades, have challenged every civilian who has tried to grapple with them.

“Geurts is individually very strong, and he was very innovative,” said Bryan Clark, a naval expert at the Hudson Institute, “but he fell short on some of the blocking and tackling that you need to manage on the larger platform programs, even as he excelled in the advancement of these smaller, more innovative and technologically advanced programs.”

It’s not clear who the Biden administration will pick to lead the Navy and manage the overhaul of shipbuilding plans the service has presented to reach a 355-ship fleet in the coming years, but it’s clear the Navy will need a new shipbuilding and modernization plan — and fast. Congress has been frustrated with the service for years, and its civilian and uniformed has been unable to come up with a plan that is affordable and manageable given existing budgets, something the new team will grapple with. 

Clark said frustration with the Navy on the Hill runs deep, and it’s not a relationship that will be easy to fix. “I think Congress’s frustration is ‘hey you have not really come up with a shipbuilding plan that is affordable, this new fleet architecture is not sustainable, and we haven’t seen a unmanned campaign plan that lays out the technology development strategy.’”