By Bryan McGrath
Friday, March 24, 2017
On a beautiful evening last July, I gathered 25 friends
for a cookout at my house to generate brutal honesty as I considered running
for office. After the food and some liquid refreshment, we retired to my porch
for conversation.
A seasoned political operative suggested I spend the next
several months as I considered the run polishing my political skills by seeking
out opportunities that resemble campaign events. “You know a lot about sea
power—why not go and talk about it? It will give you a chance to get out and
talk with a broad cross-section of people, and the opportunity to work on your
people skills.” So the American Seapower Speaking Tour was born.
During my tour, I visited two-dozen Rotary Club meetings
across Maryland. I arrived early, shook hands, and introduced myself to
virtually everyone in every room. I asked about items of local interest, and
what the big problems in the area were. Many had served in the Navy or our
other armed forces, and some had relatives still serving.
I relished their stories, enjoyed meeting people, and
left every event more energized than when I entered. I abandoned the long-shot
campaign idea early on but continued the tour, partly due to the commitment I
had made in arranging the engagements, but mostly out of the consistent sense I
gained from the Rotary chats that what I was doing was important.
In stop after stop, I engaged with Americans who were
worried about the state of Navy, surprised at the degree to which sea power
impacts U.S. prosperity, and nervous about what they understand to be the
increasing aggressiveness of China and Russia, not to mention the continuing
unpredictability of North Korea and Iran. Here is a summary of a few recurring
themes these Rotarians expressed.
Why do countries
like Russia, China, and Iran keep getting away with harassing our ships and
airplanes? When are we going to do something about it?
Americans may not want to be the world’s policeman, but
they surely do not like when our forces are harassed in potentially dangerous
ways, and they want it to stop. When I get this question, I try to walk the
audience through a generic description of what is happening during these types
of actions.
These are not new (the Soviet Union and United States
played these games throughout the Cold War; Iran has been at it since its
revolution in the late ’70s; China is somewhat late to the game). The crew has
trained scores if not hundreds of times for these very situations, the opposed
force is often operating in an unsafe and unprofessional manner, and the key to
a decision to shoot is whether they are acting “threatening.” All manner of
things go into whether the commanding officer (CO) of the ship believes he is
threatened, and he must then exercise his duty to defend his ship.
Are the boats brandishing weapons? Are the fighter planes
equipped with weapons? How are they responding (if at all) to being hailed on
the various radio frequencies set aside for such things? The CO balances these
and other factors against the Rules of Engagement and other governing orders
from higher headquarters.
The bottom line is that the CO can take defensive action
if the target 1) commits a hostile act such as firing a weapon in the direction
of the ship or 2) demonstrates hostile intent such as by flying a threatening
profile. Obviously, hostile intent is more difficult to determine, but this is
why our Navy’s crews train for these situations constantly.
I worry these aggressive acts are calculated attempts to
“pattern” U.S. responses. I fear these interactions contribute to future
tactics that may take this patterned behavior into consideration to attack a
ship that may be less vigilant. The United States should review its responses
to this harassment and begin to show some variation, if only to confound this
ongoing effort to condition our behavior.
President Trump
wants our allies to pay their fair share for their defense. If we build up our
Navy, won’t that just make them not build up their own?
This question of burden sharing and free-riding came up
at virtually every meeting, so it is clear to me that it was a wise political
move by the Trump campaign to seize upon it. Of course, we would like our
friends and allies to spend more on their own defense. Many are, but
ultimately, it is unlikely that public hectoring will drive laggard nations to
spend more. The key for recalcitrant nations to begin spending more will be
their own calculations of national risk.
With Russia and China acting in increasingly more
aggressive ways, we are beginning to see an interesting dynamic emerge, in
which a nation’s propensity to increase defense spending is correlated to its
proximity to Russia or China. Put another way, the rise of great power
contention is beginning to limit the importance of this discussion.
That said, our dominant Navy is tied directly to our
prosperity and security, and we do not “size” our Navy based on how big other
navies are—friendly or otherwise. We size our Navy to accomplish the things we
ask of it, and what we ask of it today is to maintain global freedom of the
seas. Global freedom of the seas is the minimum condition necessary for
international trade, the overwhelming majority of which moves by sea.
That international trade is a source of much of our
national wealth, and our national wealth is the source of our security. I wish
to leave neither of these things—security or prosperity—in the hands of another
nation.
Why haven’t we
heard more about the decline in the size of the Navy?
The complexity of a good answer to this question forced
me to spend a good bit of time trying to simplify it. The first thing I tell
Rotarians is that the Navy has declined in size nearly every year since
1989—from 594 ships to today’s 274. The initial drive to cut the size of the
Navy came after the end of the Cold War, and there was some logic to it.
The next big decline in size happened after 9/11, when
Navy force structure was cannibalized to fund increases in the size of the Army
and Marine Corps. In fact, the post 9/11 “war on terror” (2001 to today) is a
war that the Navy did not build up for like it had for twentieth-century wars).
Rather, it declined in size throughout the conflict.
This is a shared responsibility of the Bush and Obama
administrations, along with the eight separate Congresses that authorized and
appropriated funds. There is plenty of blame for today’s too small and poorly
maintained Navy, and very few people are willing to take responsibility for it.
Another reason this decline is not common knowledge is
that the men and women in the best position to inform the nation of these
facts—senior uniformed admirals—are discouraged by the bureaucratic nature of
the Pentagon from making the case if it is inconvenient to the political ends
of the administration in power. Once the Department of Defense arrives at its
budget input (the product of intense compromise among the various claimants,
including the armed services) and sends it to the White House for transmission
to Congress, Navy leadership is effectively committed to whatever size Navy the
budget input supports, rather than the Navy the nation needs.
Navy leaders do a good job of answering direct and
probing questions when they testify before Congress, but were they to actively
take to the speaking circuit and discuss why the resources they receive are
insufficient, they would be out of jobs forthwith.
Will President
Trump be able to build his 350-ship Navy?
This has come up consistently since the election, for
obvious reasons. My answer is that the only way the Navy ever grows in our
system is if it is the president’s priority. President Trump has made it clear
that he wants the Navy to grow and that his goal is 350 ships.
While presidential support is crucial, it is not
sufficient. Congress ultimately must spend Americans’ tax money to build the
Navy, and building navies is never cheap. To be convinced to spend this money,
the American people and their representatives need a compelling reason to do
so, something I refer to as an “American sea power narrative.”
The narrative must start with why we need a Navy at all.
It must lay out what we wish to ask of the Navy, and where we wish for it to
operate. It must identify the threats to our security and prosperity the Navy
must address, and specify the capabilities that are most critical to addressing
them. Finally, the ultimate size of the Navy must be analytically linked to the
elements just provided. It is early yet in the Trump administration for such a
narrative to emerge, but if his Navy is to be built, it must be done.
Good people, serving their communities out of the
goodness of their hearts, gave me their full attention and interest during
these talks. Their questions were insightful and important, and their love of
country was manifest. In some cases, the clubs I was talking to were less than
50 miles from Washington DC, but they were clearly living outside the “bubble”
I work in every day. It really does not take much effort to listen to
America—perhaps more ought to try it.
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