An interesting debate in conservative defense circles is whether the U.S. Navy needs a dramatically increased fleet size. I don’t believe it does. While the Navy needs more than its present, approximate strength of 280 ships, it does not need the 355 ships it currently seeks.
Instead, the Navy must be more efficient and creative in what it does with what ships it has and more strategically minded in what ships it procures. At present, the Navy remains far too comfortable with spreading its procurement across a range of warship classes and types, and its fleet across the world. There are two problems with that approach: mismatched vulnerability-effect balances and financial cost.
Let’s start with the vulnerability-effect balance. The Navy remains deeply inefficient in terms of where and how it deploys ships. Rather than deploy in strength to areas of concern, such as the South China Sea periphery (China), the North Atlantic and Pacific (Russia), and the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea (Iran), the Navy spreads its ships across the globe. While the strategic intent here is to broadcast global strength and provide contingency response across the globe at short notice, the result is overstretch. As Defense News notes, in January 2018, the then-head of U.S. Navy fleet forces explained that his ballistic missile cruiser needs were so stretched that to fill the gaps, he was “pulling them out of strike groups to do the modernization they need to go over there.” That the Navy would pull ballistic missile cruisers away from carrier strike groups already vulnerable to long-range missile says much about the delusion that currently underpins too much of Navy strategy.
There are solutions here, but before we get to them, let’s consider the cost issue. After all, it’s clear that the Navy is also delusional about its current spending plans. A 2018 Congressional Budget Office report found that the Navy’s plan to move toward a 355-ship fleet is wildly unrealistic in cost assessment. And the problem with that lack of realism is not simply that it will force the Pentagon to reallocate its limited, precious resources to cover cost overruns, but that it reflects the Navy’s unwillingness to be realistic about what it needs from the nation to do what it needs to do for the nation. When these cost overruns inevitably become public they degrade the public’s trust in the sense of getting value for money.
Don’t misunderstand me here. As a nation we must spend a great deal on defense in order to preserve our security and way of life. But, I worry greatly that playing fast and loose with cost assessments plays into the hands of a Democratic Party which believes the Pentagon should be a piggy bank for new social programs. I tend to think that conservatives who call for larger navies still, see a recent Heritage Foundation report which called for a 400-ship fleet, ignore the risky political context of limited resources and public scrutiny.
As I say, however, these issues can be resolved.
First, the Navy should continue on its track toward about 326 ships by 2023, and then slow down procurement. This would build the fleet to a level it needs while protecting other Pentagon programs from the cost of the inevitable overruns.
Second, the Navy needs to reconsider what it needs in its fleet. I believe it needs more submarines, underwater drones, new alliances, sensor platforms, Type-45 form air defense destroyers, and stand-off weapons capabilities.
And it needs fewer aircraft carriers. Today, our aircraft carriers are simply too tactically and strategically vulnerable to Chinese and Russian stand-off weapons. This vulnerability has a secondary effect of denying the carrier air wings effective ranging onto their targets, thus reducing their potency in a major conflict.
Third, the Navy needs to be more efficient in where it sends its ships. We need to stop the random cruises and random port calls to areas of lesser strategic concern, because the ships making them cannot be sent to reinforce fleets on the frontier of strategic concern. If this means keeping some ships on near-port based training exercises back home instead of on deployment far offshore, so be it.
But the simple point here is that the Navy needs to be more introspective. It has limited resources and faces great challenges. Unoriginal thinking risks endangering U.S. military capabilities and increasing the risk that the Navy will lose its next major conflict. That must not happen.
