By Harold Hutchison
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Barack Obama has never understood why we must maintain a
strong Navy or why the decline in the number of ships is such a big deal. He
cited the advanced technology of our equipment in his condescending and
arrogant quip after Romney raised the issue. Obama’s sneering response — “We
have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have
these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines” — completely missed the
point.
In citing high technology, Obama gave us a display of
brazen hypocrisy at its finest. On his watch, the Department of Defense has
been cutting procurement programs such as the F-22 and the Expeditionary
Fighting Vehicle. In both cases, our military personnel must now make do with
aging alternatives (the F-15C and AAV-7 family of vehicles). The F-15 entered
service in 1976, the AAV-7 in 1972. By the 2016 election, both of these systems
will be 40 years old, and expected to still be in service for as much as a
decade. So much for relying on new technology — Obama has halted production of
the high-tech replacements.
The Obama administration’s neglect of the Navy can be
typified by the early retirement of the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) and its plans to
decommission other naval assets. In August of this year, I outlined on NRO why
the Enterprise should remain in service, but the Big E is only the most
prominent asset slated for premature retirement. The administration also plans
to decommission and scrap six Ticonderoga-class cruisers, although the vessels
have as many as 15 years of service life left (even without further overhauls).
Maintaining freedom of the seas requires hulls in the water — and the Navy
hasn’t even started building the replacements for these cruisers. At present,
all we have is a design study called CGX, which may or may not enter
production.
This is one area where Obama is particularly culpable:
His administration, in an effort to cut costs, proposed the retirement of the
USS Enterprise (which his allies in Congress passed in 2009) and the six
cruisers. Numerous crises are heating up around the world, as recent events
show, but there is no indication that Obama has reconsidered these retirement
plans. Certainly, it would not be hard to halt the retirements, and extenuating
circumstances clearly warrant a supplemental appropriations bill. None of our
carriers or submarines — no matter how high-tech they are — are capable of
covering the Persian Gulf and South China Sea at the same time, or the
Mediterranean Sea and the Korean peninsula simultaneously.
Obama and his allies in Congress talk about cutting the
defense budget in order to spur “nation-building at home.” Accordingly, they
have accelerated the decline, begun in 1991, of the U.S. Navy’s ship totals.
What they fail to mention is the fact that China’s defense budget has at least
quadrupled since 2000. China is becoming more aggressive around the Senkaku
Islands and the South China Sea, in disputes with American allies such as Japan
and the Philippines, and it has just commissioned its first aircraft carrier.
The Chinese build-up, including new planes, stands in stark contrast to the
Obama administration’s negligence in failing to keep the Navy properly
maintained.
As the Chinese buy new ships, planes, and armored
vehicles, the United States under Obama seems content to stand still. At the
very least, the nation should have a quantitative edge in the latest weapons.
To that end, the administration should halt the retirement of equipment
(including planes and ships) and also build new equipment. If he does not
follow this path, Obama will have made America’s task in a potential war with
China more difficult.
In World War II, when the United States built a navy
second to none, our military had a running start with the Naval Expansion Act
of 1938 and the Two-Ocean Navy Act of July 1940 — bills passed long before the
attack on Pearl Harbor. But even with that running start, most of those ships
did not arrive on the front lines until mid-1943 or later, and many sailors and
Marines paid the price in blood for America’s failure to prepare. Who will pay
the price today, in the event of military conflict?
New naval construction and the overhauling of older
assets also have an important side benefit: new jobs. Spending dollars this way
is not the “weaponized Keynesianism” that critics decry. It’s simply a prudent
investment — certainly more prudent than the taxpayer dollars lavished on
Solyndra, A123, and other green-energy “investments.”
Ultimately, the neglect of the United States Navy has
been a multi-decade scandal. Romney is to be commended for proposing to rectify
this disgraceful situation, although the 313-ship force level is still only a
little more than half the total of the 600-ship Navy that was able to send six
carriers to the Persian Gulf for Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. In this
case, Romney’s proposed build-up is a “starter home” for rebuilding the Navy —
but much more will need to be done.
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