Clemenceau once declared that war was too important to be left to the generals. But if war is too important to be left to the generals, it is also too important to be left to the civilian experts. In the United States, with our constitutionally mandated civilian control of the armed forces, we forget sometimes that hard-earned military experience must leaven the theories of civilians if our system is to work.
We would do well to keep this in mind as we near our goal of a 600-ship Navy. Media-anointed experts have raised questions about the size, character, and complexity of the Navy: Do we really need so many ships? Are the Navy and Marine Corps effective in helping to deter Soviet aggression—across the full spectrum of violence, from terrorism to nuclear war? Do we have a strategy that guides the planning and training of our forces? Is it the correct strategy? If it is, are we building the right types and numbers of ships to execute it? Finally, can this nation afford to sustain a 600-ship fleet—not only well-equipped but properly manned—for the long term? When defense restrictions become law in the zero-growth 1986 budget, and retrenchment is the theme of the hour, the answers to these questions take on added significance.
Why 600 ships?
To understand how we arrived at the size of our planned fleet of ships, we must begin by discarding the idea that this number has sprung, full blown, from the brow of some would-be Napoleon of the high seas.
Since World War II, maritime force planners have found themselves at the mercy of three enduring elements. First is geography. Water covers three quarters of the world; and the United States is an "island continent" washed by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Second are the vital interests of the United States, expressed in the web of more than 40 treaty relationships that bind us to mutual defense coalitions around the world. These relationships shape our national security requirements—together with the energy and commercial dependencies that support our economy in peace and in war.
The third element is the Soviet threat. Whatever its original rationale, the Soviet Navy’s postwar expansion has created an offense-oriented blue water force, a major element in the Soviet Union’s global military reach that supports expanding Soviet influence from Nicaragua to Vietnam to Ethiopia. From the Baltic to the Caribbean to the South China Sea, our ships and men pass within yards of Soviet naval forces every day. But familiarity, in this case, is breeding a well-deserved respect.
The Navy’s recently updated Understanding Soviet Naval Developments provides the facts about the Soviet Navy. Every American should be aware, for example, that Soviet nuclear submarines operate continuously off our coasts. "Victor"-class nuclear attack submarines are routinely found lurking near many of our principal naval ports. Soviet surface units are now making regular deployments to the contentious and vulnerable chokepoints of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Worldwide, we find the Soviet Navy astride the vital sea-lanes and navigational chokepoints, through which most of the Western world’s international trade must pass.
This is the new reality. The pattern of Soviet naval deployments has revealed itself in only the last several years. These deployments constitute a post-World War II change in the global military balance of power that has been surpassed only by the advent of thermonuclear weapons. No planner, civilian or military, can ignore the growing dimensions of Soviet maritime power.
Geography, alliances, and the Soviet threat combine to dictate the actual numbers of ships—the "size of the Navy"—required to fulfill our commitments in each of our maritime theaters. Before reviewing in detail the forces we need in each theater, some observations are in order:
► Any view of the global disposition of the U. S. Navy reveals that we often deploy in peacetime very much in the same manner as we would operate in wartime. For purposes of deterrence, crisis management, and diplomacy, we must be present in the areas where we would have to Fight if war broke out. Of course, the operational tempo is different—a roughly three-to-one ratio in wartime, as compared with peacetime.
We also train as we intend to fight. A full-scale general war at sea would rarely find a carrier battle group operating alone. So we train often in multiple carrier battle forces in such exercises as FLEETEX, READEX, and NATO exercises, like Northern Wedding, which we conduct in the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea.
► Our maritime security depends on significant assistance from allies in executing our missions. Fortunately, we count among our friends all of the world’s great navies, save one. Clearly, in areas such as diesel submarines, frigates, coastal patrol craft, minesweepers, and maritime patrol aircraft, allies of the United States have assets absolutely essential to us for sea control in war and peace. In some regions, such as the Eastern Atlantic and the waters surrounding the United Kingdom, our allies supply a significant portion of the antisubmarine capability to counter the Soviet threat. In fact, if we could not count on our allies, we would require a U. S. fleet much larger than 600 ships, to deal with the 1,700 ships and submarines that the Soviets can deploy against us. But the world’s greatest navies are on our side, and this gives a tremendous advantage to the U. S, Navy and a significant cost savings to the U. S. taxpayer.
► America’s increasing commercial and energy interdependence with Asia, and the growth of the Soviet Pacific Fleet—now the largest of the four Soviet fleets—have negated the so-called "swing strategy" of the Sixties and Seventies, which planned to reinforce the Atlantic Fleet with combatants from the Pacific in time of crisis. Today, the United States has an Asian orientation at least equal to its historic engagement in Europe. Existing treaty relationships in the Pacific have been augmented by growing commercial connections. For example, in 1980, the value of U. S. trade with the Pacific rim nations was roughly equal to trade with the country’s Atlantic partners. Four years later, Pacific trade exceeded that with Western Europe by $26 billion.
Similarly, oil dependencies have shifted tremendously in the last five years. This forces America to reconsider the priorities of naval deployments in the Northern Pacific and Caribbean regions. The reorientation of U. S. sources for crude oil—on a hemispheric axis—is a long-term geopolitical reality that has gone largely unnoticed. Western dependency on Middle Eastern oil is still debated at length, for its impact on our military thinking and force planning. But we must also take into account that, in 1985, the United States imported eight times as much oil by sea from the Western Hemisphere as it received from the entire Middle East. Oil from Mexico has increased to almost 25% of our imports, while oil from Saudi Arabia has dropped to only 2.6% of the U. S. import market. We no longer depend primarily on the Middle East and Persian Gulf supply for our vital energy needs. Instead, the locus of our oil trade is in the Western Hemisphere: Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and the Caribbean area.
With these observations as background, let us review our forces in the main geographic areas: the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and Indian Ocean-Persian Gulf. The numbers used are "notional." They illustrate force packages constructed for peacetime tasks now assigned to our naval forces. But they are capable of expansion or contraction, should war break out—a flexibility characteristic of naval power.
The Atlantic: The large Atlantic theater encompasses the North Atlantic, the Norwegian Sea, the Northern Flank of NATO including the Baltic throat, the South Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. It includes the coasts of South America and the west coast of Africa, all vital sea-lanes of communications. And it involves the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
The U. S. Navy operates in the Atlantic theater with two fleets, the Sixth and the Second. The Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean is the principal Fighting force of the NATO Southern Europe Command and provides strike, antiair superiority, antisubmarine, and close air support for the entire Southern Flank of NATO—a principal makeweight in the balance in the Central Front.
In addition, the Sixth Fleet is the principal naval force that supports our friends and allies in the Middle East. The threat there is significant. The Soviets maintain a fleet in the Black Sea and a deployed squadron in the Mediterranean. In wartime, we expect to see also Soviet naval strike aircraft, aircraft carriers, a formidable number of diesel and nuclear submarines, and a full range of strike cruisers, destroyers, and other smaller combatants.
To deal with this threat, as we do in all our planning, we start with a base of allied forces in the areas under consideration. The navies of our allies are good. For example, we count on them to provide about 140 diesel submarines, which are effective for coastal and area defense, for establishing and maintaining barriers, and for certain other useful missions.
In wartime, purely U. S. forces in the Sixth Fleet would have to include three or four carrier battle groups, operating to meet NATO commitments. We would also need to deploy a battleship surface action group and two underway replenishment groups. In peacetime, we average over the year one and one-third carrier battle groups deployed in the Mediterranean.
The Second Fleet is the heart of the Atlantic strike fleet for NATO. It is responsible for naval operations in the North Atlantic, the Eastern Atlantic, Iceland, the Norwegian Sea, the defense of Norway, and the entire Northern Flank including the North Sea and Baltic throat. It must simultaneously accomplish any naval missions required in the Caribbean, where we now face a very large Soviet and Cuban naval presence; in the South Atlantic, where we have vital sea-lanes; and along the West African sea-lanes, where the Soviets now deploy naval forces continuously.
For the Second Fleet, in wartime, we must plan to have four or five carrier battle groups, one battleship surface action group, and three underway replenishment groups. This is the equivalent firepower of 40 World War II carriers and can deliver accurate strike ordnance on target equal to 800 B-17s every day. In peacetime, we generally run higher than this, because most of our principal training occurs in the Second Fleet’s operating areas.
Today, we have six carrier battle groups cycling in the Second Fleet at one time or another. We have exercises underway with our NATO allies, with our South American and Central American allies, and with other nations, on an ad hoc basis, in every season of the year.
The Pacific: Clearly, our increasing commercial interests and historic security ties in the Pacific impact on our naval planning for the area. If we are to protect our vital interests, we must have forces available to deploy—not only to the Atlantic theaters and the Sixth and the Second fleets—but also to the Pacific simultaneously, to the Seventh and the Third fleets and the Middle East Force of the Central Command. We cannot abandon one theater in order to deal with the other. The great paradox of the 1970s was the reduction of the fleet’s size so that it could only be employed in a swing strategy—just as that strategy was being rendered obsolete by trade, geopolitics, and the growth of the Soviet Navy.
The Seventh Fleet is our forward Western Pacific fleet, which meets our commitments to Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand, and in the critical straits of Southeast Asia, as well as the Indian Ocean. In wartime, we would need to deploy five carrier battle groups to the Seventh Fleet, two battleship surface action groups, and four underway replenishment groups. In peacetime, we average over the year the equivalent of one and one-third carrier battle groups in the Western Pacific. That, of course, helps us maintain a peacetime fleet- wide operational tempo that provides for at least 50% time in home port for our people and their families.
We do not have a separate fleet in the critical area of Southwest Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf, although some have proposed the re-creation of the Fifth Fleet for that purpose. In peacetime, we have the Middle East Force of the Central Command and elements of the Seventh Fleet, normally a carrier battle group.
In wartime, we plan for two of the Seventh Fleet carrier battle groups to meet our commitments in the Indian Ocean, Southwest Asia, East Africa, the Persian Gulf area, and Southeast Asia. Notionally, a Seventh Fleet battleship surface action group and one underway replenishment group would also be assigned to operate in these areas.
The Third Fleet has responsibility for operations off Alaska, the Bering Sea, the Aleutians, the Eastern Pacific, and the Mid-Pacific region. In wartime, there would be considerable overlapping and trading back and forth between the Seventh and Third fleets. This happened in the Pacific during World War II. To cover that vast area, we must assign two carrier battle groups and one underway replenishment group.
These requirements compel us to deploy a 600-ship Navy as outlined in Table 1. In peacetime, we deploy in the same way to the same places we must control in war, but at one-third the tempo of operations. This allows a bearable peacetime burden of six-month deployment lengths and 50% time in home ports. Looked at either way, we require the same size fleet to meet peacetime deployments as we do to fight a war. Taken together they add up to the following:
► Fifteen carrier battle groups
► Four battleship surface action groups
► One-hundred attack submarines
► An adequate number of ballistic missile submarines
► Lift for the assault echelons of a Marine amphibious force and a Marine amphibious brigade
When escort, mine warfare, auxiliary, and replenishment units are considered, about 600 ships emerge from this accounting—a force that can be described as prudent, reflecting geographic realities, alliance commitments and dependencies, and the Soviet fleet that threatens them. Unless Congress reduces our commitments or the Soviet threat weakens, there is no way to reduce the required size of the U. S. fleet and still carry out the missions assigned to the Navy.
|
|
Peacetime Maritime Strategy |
Wartime Maritime Strategy |
|---|---|---|
|
|
Sixth Fleet |
|
|
CVBG |
1.3 |
4 |
|
BBSAG |
.3 |
1 |
|
URG |
1 |
2 |
|
|
Second Fleet* |
|
|
CVBG |
6.7 |
4 |
|
BBSAG |
1.7 |
1 |
|
URG |
4 |
3 |
|
|
Seventh Fleet** |
|
|
CVBG |
2 |
5 |
|
BBSAG |
.5 |
2 |
|
URG |
1 |
4 |
|
|
Third Fleet* |
|
|
CVBG |
5 |
2 |
|
BBSAG |
1.5 |
— |
|
URG |
4 |
1 |
|
* Includes forces in overhaul |
||
|
Note: CVBG - carrier battle group; BBSAG = battleship surface action group; URG = underway replenishment group |
||
Does the Navy have a role in the national strategy?
While the Carter administration questioned whether the Navy could influence a "short war11 in Central Europe, such a proposition is indefensible today. The coalition of free nations bound together in NATO must have maritime superiority as a prerequisite for any defense strategy. Maritime superiority alone may not assure victory but the loss of it will certainly assure defeat—and sooner rather than later. The chronicles of warfare from the classical era forward are a consistent testament to the influence of sea power upon history, in which great continental powers do not long prevail against an opponent with mastery of the seas. Today, continental defense in NATO rests on early achievement of maritime superiority. The Soviet Union, as evidenced by its ongoing naval expansion, understands the experience of history far better than our trendier military reformists.
Does the Navy have a strategy? Is it the right one?
Now, consider the charge leveled by some parlor room Pershings that our current naval buildup lacks an underlying strategy.
Not since the days of Theodore Roosevelt have the Navy and Marine Corps exhibited such a strong consensus on the comprehensive strategy which now forms our naval planning. Briefly stated, our strategic objectives are the following:
► To prevent the seas from becoming a hostile medium of attack against the United States and its allies
► To ensure that we have unimpeded use of our ocean lifelines to our allies, our forward-deployed forces, our energy and mineral resources, and our trading partners
► To be able to project force in support of national security objectives and to support combat ashore, should deterrence fail
To achieve these objectives, we need a strategy at once global, forward deployed, and superior to our probable opponents. Global, because our interests, allies, and opponents are global; forward deployed, because to protect those interests and allies, and to deter those opponents, we must be where they are; superior, because if deterrence fails it is better to win than lose.
But do we have the correct strategy? Today’s debates would benefit from a more precise understanding of the role of strategy. Strategy is not a formula for fighting each ship and deploying each tank in the battles that may take place around the world. That is not the function of the military establishment inside the Washington Beltway. Such is the proper function only of the theater commander who is given the responsibility to carry out the defense objectives set by the national command authorities.
Beyond the central concept of global, forward-deployed, and superior naval forces, strategy’s role is to give coherence and direction to the process of allocating money among competing types of ships and aircraft and different accounts for spare parts, missile systems, defense planning, and the training of forces. It provides guidelines to aid us in allocating both resources and shortages.
Title 10 of the U. S. Code charges the Secretary of the Navy with ensuring the highest level of training appropriate to the responsibilities placed upon both the Marine Corps and the Navy. That is what strategy provides to us—a framework within which to train. For example, U. S. naval forces recently conducted a major training exercise, "Ocean Safari 85," with our NATO allies and the U. S. Coast Guard and Air Force. The "Safari" assembled off the East Coast of the United States and fought its way across the Atlantic, moved north of England and east of Iceland, and ended up in the Norwegian Sea. Approximately 155 ships and 280 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters operated for four weeks in this environment, against 19 real Soviet ships and submarines and 96 Soviet aircraft sorties.
That is very effective training, and it is being carried out as part of a coherent training operational plan—linked to the way that the theater commanders intend to fight a war. One will search in vain, however, for a Navy cookbook that tells those on-scene commanders when to move aircraft carriers, or how or where to move attack submarines or Aegis cruisers at any given point after a conflict commences. There should never be any such cookbook and certainly it should never come from Washington. Those who criticize our strategy for being the wrong cookbook or for not having a cookbook do not understand strategy.
Other critics argue that our Navy should be less global, less forward-deployed, or less superior, with the resources saved to be poured into a stronger continental defense. To be less global means to abandon some area of our vital interests. To believe that in the case of the Northern Flank of NATO, for example, a "passive" defense line thrown across the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap will somehow protect our sea-lanes or defer an engagement with Soviet forces demonstrates a lack of understanding of the fundamental mechanics of war at sea and the workings of NATO and the Soviets’ own operational requirements. No coalition of free nations can survive a strategy which begins by sacrificing its more exposed allies to a dubious military expediency. To suggest that naval support of Norway or Turkey is too dangerous because it must be done close to the Soviet Union is defeatist. To suggest that such a strategy is provocative of the Soviets just indicates the lengths to which some critics will go, in order to portray Soviet intentions as solely defensive.
As for strengthening our continental defenses, we and our allies are also doing just that. To discard maritime superiority in an attempt to match the larger Soviet ground forces, however, would give us neither conventional deterrence on land nor secure access by sea unless the Western democracies are prepared to militarize their societies to an unprecedented, and unwise, degree.
Are we buying the 'right' Navy for the strategy?
Because research and development projects span decades, and ships take many years to build, the makeup of our fleet can not change radically with each administration. Instead, the fleet evolves over time with policy and technology. The fleet today reflects the wisdom of the deck plates, the labs, and lessons learned from our exercises. The size and design of our ships and weapons reflect the inputs of sailors in contact with Soviet "Victor" submarines, Kiev-class carriers, and "Bear" aircraft. The wisdom of common sense and the highest available technology are tremendous advantages, brought to the design of today’s Navy and Marine Corps.
Of course, there are many kinds of ships not in the fleet today that could do very well. The British Invincible-class vertical or short take-off and landing (VSTOL) carriers are quite capable antisubmarine warfare ships. It would be nice to have some of them in the U. S. Navy. There are many attractive European frigate designs, and we could make good use of them. There are also diesel submarines in our European alliance navies that fulfill very effective roles.
If the taxpayers of our allies around the world were not buying these vessels, the burden would fall upon us. But happily, they are carrying a considerable share of the cost of naval defense and American taxpayers do not have to fund a Navy greater than about 600 ships.
Perhaps the most debated issue on newspapers’ front pages and television talk shows is whether our aircraft carriers should be large or small. There is no absolute answer to this question, but in my view, the evidence still seems overwhelmingly in favor of the Nimitz (CVN-68)- class carrier of 90,000 tons as the optimum size and design for putting air capability at sea.
Could we gainfully employ more mid-size carriers like our 64,000-ton Midway (CV-41) and Coral Sea (CV-43)? Yes, indeed. They would be very useful. The Navy would like to have five more of them if we could afford to buy them. At least, we will keep these two smaller carriers steaming in the force for a long time to come.
Similarly, with our nuclear attack submarines, we could buy more of them if we compromised on their capabilities. But our tremendous edge in technology is a permanent potential built into the nature of our culture and our economic system compared with the Soviets. We must build to this advantage, and not trade it away for cheaper, smaller, less capable ships built in greater numbers, which is the forte of a totalitarian, centralized, Gosplan economy.
It would be a great mistake for us to adopt a defense strategy at sea—any more than on land—that attempts to match totalitarian regimes in sheer numbers of cheap reproducible items. Time and again, the high-tech solution has proved to be the wisest investment, and by far the most advantageous one for the United States and its allies. This is true of our missiles, our aircraft, and our ships. We have the world’s finest fighting equipment.
So we are getting the "right" Navy. Although there are plenty of other kinds of ships we would like to have, and we could certainly use the larger Navy long advocated by the Joint Chiefs, we have stayed consistently with the 600- ship fleet because we are prepared to bet that our allies will continue to maintain modem, effective navies and air forces. We are prepared to accept the risk that our nation will make the right decisions to prevent losses of forces early in a conflict, and we think that that is a prudent risk to run in order to have an affordable Navy.
Can we afford the Navy this nation needs?
Numerous studies and surveys, among them a tome by the Congressional Budget Office, suggest that we cannot afford to sustain, or properly man, a 600-ship Navy. Just the reverse is true. Consider the facts. We have now, under construction and fully funded, all of the ships necessary to attain a 600-ship Navy centered on 15 carrier battle groups, four battleship surface action groups, and 100 nuclear-powered attack submarines.
Our long-term plans in a "zero growth" budget for fiscal year 1986 now reflect reductions in our shipbuilding and aircraft procurement programs. These reductions will be to levels we call the sustaining rate for the 600-ship Navy, an average 20 ships a year in new construction. The actual number will be higher or lower in a given year, depending on the block obsolescence of various types of ships.
The 20-ship average is a sound basis for planning, in part because of improved maintenance and the corresponding increase in longevity. Instead of the average 26 years of life that we realized from our ships in the 1960s and the 1970s, we are now getting 30 years’ service from our ships, because of better maintenance, the absence of a big backlog of overhauls, and the higher technology that we are putting into our ships.
This "good news" should not blind us to the requirements of the future. A steady 20-new-ships-a-year average will require 3% budget growth. A future of zero-growth budgets would mean that we will be unable to sustain a 600-ship Navy—or for that matter, a capable defense. We know from painful experience in the 1970s that the damage done by no-growth funding is far greater than the mere percentage budget loss would indicate. With zero- or negative-growth budgets, the industrial infrastructure vital to fleet construction and support shrinks dramatically. The result is a loss in competitive bidding and a return to sole- sourced monopolies. Rates of production must then be cut, individual unit costs increase dramatically, productivity falls, and, in the final accounting, the American taxpayer gets much less "bang for the buck." Even worse is the decline in the quality and morale of the people who man the fleet, as we saw in the late 1970s.
Is 3% real growth beyond our means? Throughout the past two decades, many commentators favoring a reduced defense effort have repeatedly predicted that the American people will not support sustained defense growth. That refrain is now put forward by some, including the Congressional Budget Office, as a fact of life. While it may express their hopes, it is not supported by history. That view takes as its norm the flat or even declining figures of the immediate post-Vietnam War period. In fact, except for those years, post-World War II naval budgets maintained growth commensurate with our national economy. The middle and late Seventies, by contrast, are now being seen as an anomaly in U. S. history. It is not apparent, the Congressional Budget Office notwithstanding, that the American people wish to "restore" that aberrant pattern of declining numbers of ships, morale, and readiness.
In procurement, we should not assume that Congress will refuse to make the necessary legislative changes in the way we in the Department of the Navy are permitted to conduct our business. Indeed, I suggest that, in the current aura of public concern over budget deficits and government spending, there would be few more cost-effective and money-saving moves that Congress could undertake than the removal of excessive regulations and red tape that characterize the environment in which the Navy operates today. For example, there repose in the Library of Congress today no less than 1,152 linear feet of statutory and regulatory law governing procurement alone! That is the real Washington Monument!
Along with over-regulation, we are faced with excessive, layered bureaucracies, and the accretion of authority without concomitant responsibility into a confusing labyrinth of congressional oversight committees and federal agencies without end, creating tremendous inefficiencies.
The Congressional Budget Office staffers and others who look at the Navy’s future costs assume that just because this bloated, inefficient congressional-executive system has been in place it will remain in place. I do not accept that. Moreover, we have shown in the Navy a historic reversal of the trend of inevitable cost increases.
Today, for example, the last contract that we signed for a follow-on Aegis cruiser was $900 million. Four years ago, these cruisers cost more than $1.2 billion each, and were projected to reach $1.6 billion by the end of 1985. It did not happen, though, because we brought competition into the program. Both producing yards brought in new efficiencies and instituted strict cost discipline, while we in the Navy applied a new asceticism to our gold-plating lusts. All of our shipbuilding programs show the same pattern. We have gone from only 24% competition in 1981 to 90% competition in 1985, producing an average of $1 billion in cost underruns for each of the last four years.
Contrary to what the nay-sayers predicted, the costs of Navy aircraft have been going down, not up. This is a sea change, a break with 30 years of uninterrupted cost escalation in naval aircraft procurement. During 1976-1981, growth in aircraft unit prices averaged about 10% in constant fiscal year 1980 dollars. In 1981, we implemented vigorous cost management programs which emphasized competition, no design changes, and firm fixed-price contracts. These efforts have paid off in reduced aircraft prices every year since 1982.
For example, we reached agreement with McDonnell Douglas on a fiscal year 1985 fly-away price of $18.7 million for the F/A-18 strike fighter. In terms of fiscal year 1982 dollars, this is a price 32% below that paid in 1982. Purchases in 1985 represent a savings to the taxpayer of $126 million for that year alone.
So, there is nothing inevitable about escalating costs and overruns in defense procurement. During the last four years we proved that it can be just as consistent to have underruns. And so if we just make prudent assumptions, not even optimistic assumptions, there is no question that we can maintain the size and the current mix of our force through the rest of this century with a 3% growth budget.
Just as significant, we can also maintain the tremendous turn-around in readiness that we have achieved with President Ronald Reagan’s 7% growth budgets. During the past four years, the readiness of our ships and aircraft has increased nearly 40%. Even these statistics do not do justice to the palpable difference in the fleet itself, in morale, in readiness, and in safety—i.e., uncrashed airplanes and unbroken equipment and reduction of tragic accidents.
We know what we have accomplished during the past five years. Furthermore, we know we can maintain this record of success with the size budgets that are currently envisioned by the President.
The German military philosopher Clausewitz once observed that in the balance of power among nations., battle is to deterrence as cash is to credit in the world of commerce. One may live entirely by paper transactions only when there is no doubt about one’s ability to settle accounts with hard currency when challenged.
Similarly, there must be no doubt in the minds of Soviet leaders that the United States and its allies can and will settle accounts, on both land and sea, if challenged. The 600-ship Navy is an essential element in this credibility. We can, and must, afford the naval power that will sustain the defense of this country’s allies and interests around the world.
