The retired head of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet is worried about the long-term impact of a government shutdown.
Retired Adm. Scott Swift said he lived through other government shutdowns as a naval commander.
“It disenfranchised all the civilians who worked with me and for me in the Pentagon,” he said.
Though the Department of Defense is funded during this government shutdown, Swift is concerned about the long-term impact on other federal workers. Some workers will learn for the first time that they’re considered non-essential. Others will struggle financially, working without paychecks.
“We had people who had been civilians for 40 years,” Swift said. “Suddenly we’re telling them the bottom-line truth in their minds that they weren’t essential, that what they were doing was non-essential.”
Some workers will retire, he said. Younger workers will decide government service is not for them.
“What we were left with, was that middle group, who felt they had been disenfranchised,” he said. “They were good people. They weren’t quitters, but took them a long time to get to a point of trust.”
Swift was at UC San Diego Wednesday to give a lecture before the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. He retired last year as the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Since leaving the Navy, Swift has become a Robert E. Wilhelm fellow at MIT Center for International Studies, where he has toured the Pacific and Europe.
“The general view in the region is the United States has retracted to a level that is counterproductive to the levels of stability that we enjoyed just a year ago,” he said.
Swift is arguing that the U.S. needs a grand strategy for working in the Pacific, especially as it asserts itself on a global stage.
