By Robert C. O'Brien & Jerry Hendrix
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
One of President Trump’s signature campaign promises to
the American people was a 350-ship Navy. The Navy itself has stated
unequivocally that it needs a bare minimum of 355 ships to meet the missions
with which it has been tasked by our regional combatant commanders. Yet, sadly,
it is becoming clear that no real budgetary steps have been or will be taken to
fund this promise. Further, there is nothing on the horizon to suggest that
anything will change on this front.
The failure to rebuild America’s fleet could not have
come at a worse time. The world has grown increasingly dangerous, with a
nuclear madman in North Korea testing an ICBM a month, mullahs in Tehran
plotting the takeover of the Middle East, Russia engaging in “frozen conflicts”
in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, a very hot civil war in Syria, and China
appropriating a vast swath of the Pacific to itself. The forgoing list does not
even take into account the United States’ continuing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and dozens of other remote locales where we are in daily combat with al-Qaeda,
ISIS, the Taliban, and their assorted jihadi fellow travelers.
Budgetary
Irresponsibility and Material Passivity
Although both the House and the Senate Armed Services
Committees have endorsed a significant increase in military spending at
President Trump’s behest, Congress sidestepped procedural opportunities that
would have ended the 2011 Budget Control Act’s caps on defense spending. The
caps led to disastrous cuts in military spending. Defense sequestration
severely affected the overall readiness of our forces, a result for which
American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have paid a heavy price. There
seems to be no desire in the House Ways and Means Committee or the Senate
Appropriations Committee to partner with the authorizers to fix this situation.
The Navy has not helped itself either. It has not pursued
service-life extensions for retiring ships, such as the Ticonderoga-class cruisers or Los
Angeles–class attack submarines scheduled for decommissioning in the next
few years. Nor has it recalled into service ships such as the ten sturdy Perry-class frigates that are in the
ready-reserve fleet. In fact, with regard to the reserve fleet, the Navy has
acted precipitately either to sell off useful hulls, such as the Osprey-class mine-hunters — ships that
could have accompanied the fleet during operations off the coast of North Korea
or Iran — or to outright scrap or sink, in target practice, ships such as the Spruance-class destroyers, many of which
had years of life left in their hulls. Neither has the Navy pursued
low-cost/high-impact solutions such as building missile-patrol boats or
installing vertical-launch-system cells on its new amphibious ships to give its
smaller fleet a bigger punch. The Navy has demonstrated time and again that it
is unwilling to embrace innovative approaches that are both efficient and
effective with regard to its force structure.
The combination of congressional budgetary
irresponsibility and the Navy’s passivity with respect to platforms is
occurring even as Chinese shipyards are launching warships at record rates and
Russia continues to invest in exquisitely effective submarines that, though
produced in low numbers, can dominate the North Atlantic. As Admiral Dönitz
almost proved in the last century, a submarine blockade of Western Europe could
render the purpose of the treaty organization that bears the North Atlantic
name moot. Key adversary naval and aviation platforms look remarkably similar
to their U.S. counterparts because of massive ongoing campaigns to steal
advanced U.S. military technologies. Both cyber and old-fashioned
human-intelligence industrial espionage has occurred for decades without any
significant retribution by the United States. There has been, perhaps, no
greater demonstration of strategic lassitude since the West watched passively
as Germany rearmed in the 1930s.
The Navy Is Broken
The simple fact is that the Navy is too small to do all
that is asked of it. The service is attempting to maintain its historic average
of 85 to 100 ships deployed, but the recent spate of groundings and collisions
in the western Pacific has pulled back the curtain on the dire state of
American naval training and readiness. Ships are being deployed with more than
a third of their training requirements and certifications unmet. Sailors are
working in excess of 100 hours a week and getting less sleep than the human
body can bear. The Navy has mismanaged its enlisted end strength.
The cost of this conduct has been high. In less than a
year we have lost the lives of 17 sailors who slept in their bunks while their
destroyers collided with massive merchant ships. The policy of “doing more with
less” was exposed as a sham that has resulted in the firing of multiple senior
naval leaders. While the human toll of “doing more with less” is beyond
bearing, the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to two destroyers alone
— McCain and Fitzgerald — would have been more than enough to refit all ten Perry-class frigates in the reserve
fleet and return them to active service.
The Fleet Is Not
Big Enough to Fulfill Its Current Missions
The nation’s civilian leadership — the president and
Congress — decides our “national interests.” The regional combatant commanders
then determine the forces needed to uphold those national interests. The
combatant commanders have identified the 18 maritime regions where the Navy
must operate to preserve the global security and economic system that America
created after World War II. Some of these regions, such as the Caribbean,
require only two ships to keep one ship deployed. Other regions, such as the
Pacific, require four ships — one in maintenance, one training, one transiting,
and one deployed — to keep one ship forward. Similarly, some regions, such as
the Arabian Gulf, require a full carrier strike group (six ships), while
others, such as the Gulf of Guinea, can be serviced by a single amphibious
landing-ship dock. Taking all of these regional factors into account would set
the necessary fleet size at approximately 440 ships. The Navy’s leadership,
however, has established that it can deploy 85 to 100 ships at a time to meet
combatant commander missions with a smaller fleet of 355 ships.
What is now very clear is that the Navy cannot continue
to meet all combatant commander–requested missions with the current fleet of
just 279 ships. If the Navy tries to do so, we can expect more collisions, more
injuries, and more deaths in the fleet. At some point the broken fleet will
enter into a “death spiral,” as the growing number of sidelined ships places an
even greater strain on the remaining operational ships, calling those ships’
readiness in question.
There Are
Strategic Options for a Smaller Navy
If Congress will not appropriate funds to build the
355-ship fleet, and the Navy’s leadership will not innovate to increase its
warship numbers, then America must have a new naval strategy to prevent the
fleet from entering a death spiral from which it would be very difficult to
recover.
The first and most obvious option is to reduce the number
of maritime regions serviced by the United States. America spends 3.6 percent
of its GDP on its defense. Its partners do not. If the United States withdraws
from various maritime regions, it may cause the allies to step up to the task.
For instance, Norway (1.6 percent), Denmark (1.1 percent), and Canada (1
percent) could rebuild their own navies and take up responsibilities for the
Arctic. Norway, Denmark, Germany (1.2 percent), Poland (2 percent), Lithuania
(1.5 percent), Estonia (2.2 percent), and Latvia (1.5 percent), as well as
technically neutral Western powers Sweden (1 percent) and Finland (1.4
percent), could invest in their maritime capabilities and patrol the Baltic
with sufficient force to deter the Russians. Given that Aegis Ashore systems
have been installed in Romania and soon will be operational in Poland, another
region that could be considered for American withdrawal is the Black Sea, which
could be covered by Turkey (1.7 percent), Romania (1.5 percent), and Bulgaria
(1.4 percent). In the Pacific, the contentious South China Sea could be left to
the states on its borders — Taiwan (2 percent), the Philippines (1.3 percent),
Vietnam (2.4 percent), and Malaysia (1.4 percent). Given that the United States
is now nearly energy-independent, a sub-300-ship Navy could also consider
withdrawing the Fifth Fleet command element from the Arabian Gulf (saving
additional funds by doing away with a three-star staff).
Vacating these regions and turning them over to allies
and partners would allow the Navy to lower its deployed naval force to a range
of 65 to 75 ships, thereby returning the fleet to a more balanced
maintenance-training-deployed cycle of operations. Whether our allies and
partners would step up to the task of defending their own interests in these
regions or instead just cut weak-handed deals with Russia, China, or Iran is an
open question. Even the remaining 14 maritime regions deemed critical to the national
interest would still have to be patrolled very judiciously, given our current
fleet size. The U.S. might enjoy naval superiority in many of those remaining
maritime regions, but not naval supremacy.
There is a second option: The Navy could return to its
pre–World War II deployment pattern. During this era, when the Navy had between
300 and 400 ships in the fleet, it used a “surge and exercise” model.
Maintaining fleet hubs in Norfolk and Pearl Harbor as well as in the
Philippines, the pre–World War II Navy engaged in major exercises as a battle
fleet twice a year (summer and winter) and then marshaled its ships in port to
keep readiness high in order to surge in response to crises — the way the U.K.
assembled its entire fleet to send to the South Atlantic in the Falklands war
of 1982 (at a time when the Royal Navy was much larger than it is today).
If the United States chose to return to this model, it
could actually shrink the size of the fleet to around 240 ships, all of which
possess the highest war-fighting capabilities, and organize it into two
powerful fleets, Atlantic and Pacific. The ships could be consolidated and
based in fewer strategic locations, such as Yokosuka, Japan; Pearl Harbor; San
Diego; Norfolk; Mayport, in Florida; and Rota, Spain. From these bases the Navy
would be responsible for a greatly reduced number of missions. The fleets would
exercise as fleets with allies twice a year and spend the remainder of their
time operating in and around their home ports in order to maximize maintenance
and training. Such maintenance and training would be critical, as the United
States would certainly be tested in the years following, since such a
repositioning would be interpreted as a retreat by America’s adversaries.
The Slippery Slope
of Managed Decline
On February 27, 1947, the British embassy in Washington,
D.C., notified the U.S. State Department that it was sending a courier over to
deliver a “blue piece of paper.” A “blue piece of paper” was diplo-speak for a
message of ominous importance. The note informed the United States that Great
Britain could no longer uphold its interests in Greece and Turkey and would
soon withdraw from the eastern Mediterranean. The United States understood that
without continued British support, Greece would quickly fall to the Communists
and join the Soviet bloc. The need to protect the Mediterranean from the
Communists in light of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal was a key catalyst for
both the Marshall Plan and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
If the United States attempts to turns over key maritime
regions to its allies or to reposition its fleet to an “exercise and surge”
model, the message to the world will be even more dramatic than Great Britain’s
“blue piece of paper” was in 1947. Indeed, it would make the past eight years
of “lead from behind” look like an assertive foreign policy. The message would
be clear: The world’s remaining superpower is no longer up to the task of
defending its interests and those of its allies. The ensuing vacuum of power
will be filled by other powers, and the scramble to do so will be fraught with
danger and uncertainty. All of the benefits of Pax Americana that we have taken
for granted for three quarters of a century — peace, a stable and prosperous
global market, and the economic freedom derived from the dollar’s being the
reserve currency — will come to an end over a relatively short period of time.
National decline is not an easily managed process.
Post-war Great Britain did not fall from No. 1 to No. 2 and just hold on there.
Britain’s decline continued through fits and starts in the decades that
followed. The Royal Navy, which had once been sized to exceed the next two
great-power navies combined, now sails just 89 ships, with only 37 of those
being front-line warships, and that number will likely slip further with
recently announced defense-budget cuts. Mirroring the decline of its navy,
Great Britain’s influence in the world has also diminished. While still an
important power, especially when acting within its “special relationship” with
the United States, the United Kingdom can no longer bring its once-great
influence to bear in Asia, Africa, or even Europe, as it did in centuries past.
Navies and international influence go hand in hand.
Unlike the United Kingdom, the United States does not now
have the luxury of simply handing off its responsibilities to a rising power
that shares its democratic values and commitment to the rule of law. The powers
best positioned to take advantage of a world where the United States Navy does
not protect the global commons — China, Russia, and Iran — are authoritarian
powers that scorn Western civilization and the values America and its allies
hold dear. The Obama administration took the first steps down the managed-decline
path with its doctrines of “strategic patience” and “leading from behind.” The
ensuing crises from Ukraine to Syria to Yemen to the South China Sea and North
Korea are just a foretaste of what is to come if the United States signals to
the world that it is committed to a path of managed decline by not rebuilding
its Navy.
Balance-of-Power
Instability
In a world where the United States Navy is not
forward-deployed, Russia, China, Iran, and other adversaries will aggressively
seek to carve out their own spheres of influence. Smaller neighboring nations
and even some located farther afield, recognizing an America in decline, will
lean away from the United States and toward our adversaries. Europe itself will
likely reach an accommodation with Russia. This course would be natural, as
Europe’s undisputed leader, Germany, has looked east for much of its history.
Stalwart Pacific democracies such as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan will
have no choice but to seek economic and security deals with China. Africa,
which is already at the tipping point of Chinese influence, will fall fully
into Beijing’s orbit.
India will have to gird for the coming border war with an
expansionist China, and Taiwan will prepare for the inevitable cross-strait
invasion. The alternative for both democracies — the surrender of critical
border lands for India, or of freedom for Taiwan — are probably too great to
negotiate away. Iran and Saudi Arabia will seek to establish Shia and Sunni
spheres of influence in the Middle East. The battle for supremacy there will be
particularly grisly, as we have seen over the past decade. Assuming that Russia
continues to back Iran, the outcome of that contest, without American
involvement, will probably be Iranian hegemony from the Mediterranean to the
Arabian Sea.
Under these circumstances, the United States could find
itself the dominant Western Hemisphere power but fighting a rear-guard action
for influence in South and Central America, where authoritarianism has a long
tradition and where China is already very active on the economic and diplomatic
front. While sphere-of-influence world politics can sometime appear attractive
as a means to manage the globe, one lesson that history teaches is that spheres
of influence are inherently unstable. The descent from spheres into a
balance-of-power competition can be a precursor of war. Since 1945, even during
the Cold War, the United States, through its Navy, has protected the sea lanes
of communications and managed the global commons to ensure a generally peaceful
world not divided up into spheres of influence. However, our Navy is now
stretched too thin, and our adversaries are becoming too strong, for us to
assume that this will remain the case for much longer.
The Surest
Guarantee of Peace
Today’s fleet is simply too small to continue to guard
American interests around the globe, as those interests are currently defined,
and to maintain the freedom of the global commons. By attempting to fulfill the
combatant commanders’ many and varied missions over 18 maritime regions in an
increasing dangerous world, we are literally breaking the fleet by asking our
sailors to do more with less. The four recent collisions and groundings in the
Pacific, with their attendant loss of American blood and treasure, are sad testaments
of this fact. Further, at least as of now, it is apparent that there will be no
congressional funding for a 350-ship fleet. Moreover, naval leadership does not
appear willing to take the innovative and necessary steps within the current
budget to significantly enlarge the fleet’s size within the operative budgetary
confines.
Accordingly, we have presented above two options for the
deployment of the Navy going forward. We are not in favor of either option, but
America simply cannot and should not condone the continued risk to the fleet —
both its ships and its sailors — of operating with too few resources to
accomplish its present missions. Changes have to be made. Unless Congress
overturns the 2011 Budget Control Act and fully funds the National Defense
Authorization Act, or the Navy pursues innovative approaches to increasing the
fleet by performing service-life extensions on older ships, recalling ships
such as the Perry-class frigates from
the ready-reserve fleet, and/or pursuing a low-cost/high-impact acquisition
strategy, there will be no choice but to accept one of the options we present,
or some unappetizing mix of the two.
America and the world have been great beneficiaries of
the forward presence of the United States Navy around the globe since the end
of World War II. The U.S. Navy has been a key foundation of this Pax Americana.
Abandoning that successful strategy is not something that we should do lightly,
as the dangers, which we have merely glimpsed over the past decade, are serious
indeed. Theodore Roosevelt, one of our great presidents and the only one who
was a true naval strategist, stated in his second message to Congress: “A good
Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guaranty of peace.” We
agree. It is time for Congress to fund, and for our naval leadership to build,
a 355-ship U.S. Navy. This effort must not take 30 years but be done now. The
American people voted for and deserve such a Navy, and our sailors and Marines,
who serve on those ships, do as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment