President Trump’s diversion of $2 billion to fund the border wall will come at the expense of American sea power, putting the United States at least a decade behind China and Russia due to a lack of maritime investments, say a bipartisan pair of House members.
Reps. Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat and Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican, both members of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, warned Tuesday that aggressiveness by Russia in the North Atlantic and China in the South China Sea threatened U.S. global dominance, commerce, and the U.S. economy.
“Now is the time the Chinese naval capacity and capability is growing,” Wittman at the Hudson Institute, saying investments cannot wait for a future budget cycle.
“The last thing we want is to be on a track with a smaller Navy, where other nations are on track for larger navies,” Courtney said. “This really puts the country at a huge disadvantage in terms of the Indo-Pacific region and the European command region.”
Wittman made the case that a statutory requirement for 355 ships by 2030 will be impossible to achieve at the current rate of procurement.
Trump’s budget calls for Navy cuts to include $650 million toward a new amphibious assault ship, $261 million for a new transport ship, $233 million for F-35B fighters, and $155 million for anti-submarine aircraft. The trims are aimed at freeing up money for the U.S.-Mexico border wall, a Trump campaign promise.
“I’m not a mathematician,” said Wittman. “But the math doesn’t work out to get to 355 anywhere in the 2030s if you’re going to be retiring more ships than what you build.”
Courtney said the ships the U.S. Navy does have are “Cold War era” submarines and destroyers, while Russia is building new high-tech subs and China already has more ships, though more coastal in nature, than the U.S.
At a recent Brookings Institution discussion, acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly described the scope of the China and Russia threats and called for as many as 435 ships, including manned, unmanned, and lightly manned vessels.
“We see the Russians investing heavily in their submarine force, more so than we’ve seen in the last 10 years,” he said. “They’re developing submarines that are very, very quiet and hard for us to detect.”
Modly said Russia’s movement into more navigable Arctic waters poses a challenge, and its interactions with U.S. vessels at sea, while episodic, have been “more aggressive.”
As for China, and its growth in influence in the Pacific, Modly said U.S. commerce and partnerships are in danger if we do not keep pace.
“It’s staggering to see how much commerce is coming through there,” Modly said. “We’re heavily dependent on this part of the world.”
Modly said he was “very alarmed” by “more aggressive” Chinese behavior in the region, to include economic dominance.
The Navy secretary added that while the U.S. fleet of ships is more dominant than China’s, China is making heavy investments into its shipbuilding capacity that could make it difficult for the U.S. to catch up.
“The shipbuilding capacity is off the charts in terms of what they’ve invested in their shipyards and their ability to build and to ramp up,” he said. “That is a challenge for us.”
The Department of Defense’s 2016 Force Structure Assessment called for 66 fast attack subs, but Modly said the U.S. is on the path to only have about 50 within 10 years.
Part of the reason why the U.S. is having trouble catching up, Modly said, is that ships cost more in inflation-adjusted, real dollars than they did in the ‘80s.
Then, the average adjusted ship cost was $1 billion, while today, it is about $2 billion per ship.
At its peak of reconstitution, the Navy had nearly 600 ships. Today, that number stands at 295.
“We have to think about a way to reverse that trend. So, unmanned will play a big part of that,” Modly told the policy crowd at Brookings. Modly said the Navy will be looking at smaller ships in the coming 2020 Force Structure Assessment.
Meanwhile, Courtney and Wittman said deterring adversaries and reconstituting the Navy will require returning procurement dollars to the budget.
“If we look through history, the times of major conflict have always been when near-peer adversaries believe there’s a vulnerability that they can exploit,” said Courtney. “We are going to move heaven and earth to try and make sure that a decision like that is reversed.”
