The Navy has been called to grow its fleet in the face of an aggressively growing Chinese navy, but leadership changes and conflicting shipbuilding plans have bewildered Congress in recent years.
Now, the chief of naval operations tells the Washington Examiner that competition with China is not about the size of the U.S. fleet the way it was when then-President Ronald Reagan mandated 600 ships to face the Soviet Union.
In recent years, the Navy has suffered ship collisions brought on by fatigued crews, overpriced and late-delivered combat ships, and questions about industrial base capacity. The service also cycled through military and civilian leadership while Pentagon leaders tried to prove the U.S. Navy could compete with China by promising an ever-increasing, but unfunded, fleet size that by October reached a goal of 500 manned and unmanned ships without clearly explaining to members of Congress how the vessels would be paid for.
Adm. Michael Gilday said there is now a realistic plan for growing the Navy, not another unfunded promise to build hundreds of ships.
“We need to deliver, I'm focusing on less talk and more action,” Gilday said.
The chief of naval operations said calls for a fleet with a set number of ships hearkens back to the mid-1980s under Reagan.
“The United States had a presidentially driven directive to maintain a 600-ship Navy,” Gilday told the Washington Examiner at a Defense Writer’s Group discussion.
PACIFIC COMMANDER CALLS FOR URGENT FUNDING TO CONTAIN CHINA
The Navy’s current shipbuilding plan is a formula that yields a range of ships and numbers based on exercises and war games.
“It isn't based in a pie-in-the-sky number,” he said. “The Navy does have a plan, and that plan is being informed by ongoing testing, evaluation, analysis.”
But as the 2022 budget request nears, some members of Congress are confused.
Former President Donald Trump’s first defense secretary, James Mattis, promoted a plan to build 355 ships. Trump’s last defense secretary, Mark Esper, made a pitch for 500 ships by 2045.
“We need more presence in the Pacific,” Virginia Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, a 20-year Navy veteran and member of the House Armed Services, said on a recent Hudson Institute discussion, underscoring the threat posed by China.
“We were really lacking in a 30-year shipbuilding plan and a force structure assessment" that would give members "an understanding of the direction the Navy needed to go,” she said. “There is the looming threat of China.”
Luria said on the March 15 discussion that she asked both the CNO and acting Navy secretary, Thomas Harker, for an explanation of how the Navy planned to reach the 500-ship threshold outlined in Esper's "Battle Force 2045" document and what were the inputs and assumptions that went into the plan.
The Navy appeared to back away from the Esper-era plan and could not provide the document to the Washington Examiner when requested, instead providing the more modest, congressionally mandated, 30-year shipbuilding plan.
That plan calls for the Navy to reach 355 ships between fiscal years 2031 and 2033 and 405 by 2051. China currently has some 335 surface ships, compared to America’s 296.
Asked if Battle Force 2045 had simply been gutted, Gilday tried to distinguish between plans designed by the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
“This is the secretary of defense's shipbuilding plan, not the Navy shipbuilding plan in the end,” he said. “So, I'd push back a little bit on those that criticize the Navy's lack of vision.”
'A lot of questions'
A March 18 report by the Congressional Research Service reveals why understanding how many ships the Navy requires versus the OSD plan is so confusing.
Esper withheld the Navy's 30-year shipbuilding plan and replaced it with the Department of Defense’s Future Naval Force Study, which was designed with the OSD and the Joint Staff.
The Navy had lost its say over its own fleet plans, according to the CRS.
“We have a lot of questions,” Luria said. “These questions need to be answered, really, and a lot more visibility needs to be put on the role that the Navy plays in any conflict in the Pacific and what investments we’re making today.”
Gilday explained that every deploying strike group is conducting exercises and testing the distributed maritime operations concept that forms the basis of FNFS. Information gathered will inform the Navy's budget requests for fiscal year 2022, he said.
“That's all input back into the analytic cell that is actually taking a look at shipbuilding numbers right now,” he said. “So, it's dynamic.”
With the Defense Department expected to face a flat budget under the new Democratic administration and older Navy ships being decommissioned at a rapid clip, members of Congress are demanding a clear path forward.
“I think that the FNFS has very clearly allowed us to see what the composition of the future fleet has to look like in order to not only compete but to beat the Chinese,” said Gilday.
Biden administration officials have stated Navy shipbuilding will be a top defense priority.
The administration’s coming budget proposal, now delayed longer than Trump's first blueprint, must evaluate the Navy’s needs and the influence posed by the Chinese threat. Some have called for fewer large platform ships that are more easily targeted by Chinese missiles, instead calling for smaller vessels and unmanned ships and extending the life of ships scheduled for decommission until shipbuilding can catch up.
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One thing is clear: The Navy needs a path forward that Congress can understand. Buy-in from the Hill cannot come before such a document is delivered across the Potomac River.
“I don’t want it to sound like an arms race, but in our pursuit of a larger fleet and more presence in the Pacific, you need to build more ships,” argued Luria. “We can’t just decommission ships faster than we can build them and expect the Navy to grow. The math doesn’t work.”
