Republican presidential candidates, besides competing for the nomination, have also begun a mini arms race with each other when it comes to the size of the Navy.
While making vague promises about adding troops to the Army and Marine Corps and building more planes for the Air Force, most are getting specific about the Navy and are comparing it to fleets from decades ago.
“You look at the Navy as an example. And we’re at, what, 275, 280 vessels right now. We’re headed down toward 250. That’s less than half of where we were under Reagan,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said at the New Hampshire Republican leadership summit in April. “You look at other components out there. There’s some real challenges for us being able to protect ourselves and our interests here and around the world.”
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal mentioned the Navy six times in an October speech at the American Enterprise Institute. By comparison, he mentioned the Army and Air Force twice each, and the Marines just once.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich had perhaps the boldest comment on fleet size this week.
“We have about 10 carriers now, my goal would be to get closer to 15. And you’ve got to have the ability to project power when you get there,” Kasich said.
There’s a reason most candidates focus on ships when talking about their strategy to rebuild America’s military. Chris Harmer, a senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said candidates talk about the Navy because it’ll be much more difficult, if not impossible, to build up the Navy if the need arises, while it’s easier to quickly recruit for a ground force.
“It is much easier to increase the size of the Army or Air Force on short notice than it is to increase the size of the Navy,” Harmer said. “Even at the peak of World War II, with the entire industrial might of the US brought to bear, it took three years to build the battleship Missouri.”
It’s also easier to quantify than troop levels for the Army and Marine Corps, said Justin Johnson, a senior policy analyst for defense budgets at the Heritage Foundation. It also lends itself to easy comparisons to historical naval fleets.
“It’s easy for the average American to understand how big the Navy is in a more realistic way,” he said. “250 to 300 ships is just an easier thing to understand.”
Most assessments agree the Navy should have somewhere around 350 ships to meet the demands of the country, Johnson said. Harmer put the Navy’s need at 306 ships.
Either way, the Navy is lagging even the lower end of recommendations with just 270 deployable ships, according to its website.
Making up that difference will be costly. The shipbuilding budget for fiscal 2016 is expected to be $16 billion, just 3 percent of the overall defense budget. Getting to a 350-ship Navy would probably require that figure to be doubled, and even then, it would take years to reach the recommended number.
“It’s going to take you a couple years to get even close to 350. Even 300 will take some time,” Johnson said. “Ships aren’t built in a single year.”
The size of the Navy played a large role in the 2012 presidential campaign, when GOP candidate Mitt Romney promised to grow the fleet if elected president. In a speech at the Virginia Military Institute in October 2012, Romney said the current day Navy is the smallest it’s been since 1916, and promised to fix the problem by building 15 ships a year, CNN reported.
Republicans elected to Congress in 2012 were largely a part of the tea party wave and were more concerned with balancing the budget and slashing spending than in bolstering national defense, Johnson said. But given growing threats around the world, Johnson said that tide has shifted and even budget hawks are willing to boost spending for the military.
“I think the trend has changed a little bit. I think even the most conservative Republicans, even most tea partiers, are more concerned about national security than same types who would have been elected four years ago,” he said.
George Pataki, a former New York governor, said in April that he is concerned in shrinking ballooning budgets in all areas of government — except national defense.
“I’m a great believer in the need to dramatically reduce and scale back the size and the cost of the government in Washington,” he said in an appearance on the Hugh Hewitt show. “But I’m also a believer that we have to invest more in our military going forward, more in things like the next generation of technology, more ships, more troops, and it’s the one area, or one of the only areas where I would recommend increasing government spending, not less.”
When comparing the number of ships in today’s Navy to fleets of the past, it’s also important to remember that today’s vessels are far more advanced technologically and looking at just the numbers may not be a fair comparison, Harmer said.
“Ships today are much more capable than ships then, but of course, the threat is much greater as well,” he said.
