Robert C. O’Brien, a former foreign policy adviser to Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaigns, is under consideration to serve as the next secretary of the Navy in Trump’s administration.
The Washington Examiner confirmed on Tuesday that O’Brien is being considered for the Navy’s top civilian job, according to sources. The Trump administration is considering a new round of people to serve as Navy secretary after Philip Bilden withdrew from consideration on Sunday due to complications with government ethics standards due to his business holdings. The administration is also seeking a new candidate for Army secretary after Vincent Viola dropped out over similar issues.
O’Brien is a trial lawyer and previously served as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney during his presidential runs, according to his biography. He also served as co-chair of the U.S. State department Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan under two secretaries of state, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Before that, he was the U.S. representative to the United Nations under President George W. Bush.
He has a military background, previously serving as a judge advocate general in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he reached the rank of major. Last year he published the book, While America Slept: Restoring American Leadership to a World in Crisis.
In the book, O’Brien makes the case that the clearest way to communicate the need to strengthen America’s defense is through the size of the Navy.
“Here’s the starting point for that discussion: we have a crisis in the fleet, and serious contenders on both sides of 2016 should have a plan for fixing it — and fast,” he wrote. “Today, at 284 warships, the United States Navy’s fleet is the smallest since World War I. But even that number probably overstates the Navy’s true capability: the Pentagon recently changed the rules by which it counts active warships and if you apply the traditional and more stringent method, the Navy has but 274 warships.”
O’Brien was also critical of the Navy’s request to mothball half of the service’s Ticonderoga-class cruiser fleet, calling them the “heavy firepower” of a carrier strike group that “rides shotgun” to protect a carrier. He said it’s “shocking” that the service would rather retire them than upgrade them for about $380 million.
“They can do so many things. They’re just a Swiss Army knife of a ship. They’re basically paid for,” he told Hugh Hewitt in 2015. “The cost of upgrading them is less than the cost of the least expensive Coast Guard cutter that we can put out to sea. So the idea that we wouldn’t modernize these ships, they’ve got, most of them have 20-30 more years of life.”
