This may seem an overly critical description of the best blue water navy on the planet today. The United States has 11 full-sized aircraft carriers; no other nation has more than one. America’s fleet is larger than its Russian and Chinese rivals in nuclear-powered attack submarines, cruisers, destroyers, and many other standard metrics of naval power. The U.S. Navy still claims, and physically confirms, freedom of navigation around the world. Yet U.S. naval preeminence has been deteriorating—a case of squandered strength and avoidable mistakes—since the end of the Cold War.
For nearly thirty years now, wishful thinking and a lack of accountability have driven a U.S. shipbuilding and ship maintenance program that have steadily eroded the Navy’s combat power and American security. One case in point: The U.S. Navy has not introduced a capable, cost-effective new surface warship design since the end of the Cold War (the submarine fleet is a shining exception to all that follows).
The Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, the current mainstay of the surface fleet, were planned in the early 1980s. The USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) was launched on 16 September 1989—two months before the Berlin Wall fell. Talk has already begun about yet another Burke upgrade, a potential Flight IV. The reason is clear: for thirty years, the Navy has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on exquisite, high-tech ships that delivered not enough capability, late.
Thirty-one years ago, Secretary of the Navy James Webb, Jr. resigned rather than accept a Navy budget that decommissioned 16 ships and kept the United States from attaining a 600-ship fleet. Today, despite an economy quadruple the size in constant dollars, the Pentagon budget is struggling to achieve a navy half that size. The current administration’s promise of a 355-ship Navy may only be possible by including unmanned vessels in the battle fleet numbers. How did we get here? The simple answer is that, seduced by the military-industrial complex’s whispers of technological “transformation,” America has lost the ability to build warships with any economy.
Two examples illustrate the point well. The odd-looking Zumwalt-class destroyer, with its inverted prow and stealthy appearance, was supposed to be a future cornerstone of the fleet. Really a pocket battleship, the Zumwalt boasts naval stealth technology and was optimized for land attack. In military sci-fi stories, its excess electricity powers railguns and lasers. On Earth, the Zumwalts have guns that cannot shoot because their rocket-assisted, guided projectiles would cost a prohibitive $1 million per round. And there will only be three Zumwalt-class destroyers: the cost grew so exorbitant that a planned class of 32 ships instead become a sad trio of technology demonstrators.
However, the Zumwalts look like a success when compared to the Navy’s other would-be mainstay: the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). Derided as the “Little Crappy Ship” by some in the defense community, the LCS was envisioned as a small, modular “streetfighter” that could dramatically increase the Navy’s global presence by providing many cheap hulls to the fleet. That an ill-defined “presence” mission took priority over fighting should have been an early warning sign. Yet the Navy was all in. “I predict when it is all said and done, they will be the workhorses of the fleet,” said Admiral Gary Roughead, then the Chief of Naval Operations, in 2009.
The LCS is fast but, as built, provides little combat capability. Now belatedly being equipped with the much-needed, long-range Naval Strike Missile, the surface warfare version of the LCS had originally only been intended to counter small boats.
Though designed, per the name, to operate in high-threat coastal waters, the LCS is extremely vulnerable. The Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation stated flatly in 2011 that “LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment.” Not essential criteria for a U.S. Navy ship, somehow.
LCS is also over-budget and plagued by maintenance problems. Fifteen years after two shipyards began cutting steel on the first hulls, only a handful of LCSs have been deployed overseas—several to do Coast Guard work in the Caribbean. So much for “presence.”
While the Navy spent heaps of dollars and brain cells on LCS, first in conceiving it and then in trying to save it, it quietly killed off the class of small ship that is essential: the frigate.
Multipurpose, small warships between the size of Coast Guard cutters and Navy destroyers, frigates have been a crucial piece of navies since the age of sail. As Ian Toll related in his celebrated book Six Frigates, the U.S. Navy’s original six frigates were its backbone. At the height of the Cold War, the Navy had 111 frigates in service. Today it has zero.
Frigates serve many roles, but escort duty is primary. Lacking frigates, the Navy now has little wartime ability to escort merchantmen, or even the merchant marine ships that would be required to carry any significant U.S. expeditionary force overseas. The Navy has initiated the FFG(X) program to procure a new frigate, but a design has not been chosen yet. There is also much talk of new Cold Wars in Europe and Asia with Russia and China. If these rivalries turn hot, the United States’ ability to reinforce overseas garrisons will be in doubt because of the absence of frigates.
Small ships that can fight are not the only thing in short supply in today’s Navy. Many defense analysts are inclined to believe that the aircraft carrier is already a white elephant, an expensive target in the event of a real war. In the age of supersonic antiship missiles, the cost of the carrier is hard to justify. The $13 billion-dollar price tag on the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) puts it on the losing end of a cost-imposition strategy by the Chinese: for $13 billion the Chinese can buy thousands of missiles to threaten the ship. Yet the U.S. Navy is doubling down, with the Ford to be followed by the John F. Kennedy in 2024 and the Enterprise in 2027.
Absent serious intervention, the shipbuilding situation could get worse. Naval analysts have christened the coming decade the “Terrible Twenties,” as the ballooning national debt, aging ships, and the need to recapitalize the Navy’s nuclear ballistic missile submarine deterrent force will create unbearable pressures on the naval budget. Forget 355 or even 300 ships: the Navy could shrink without innovative solutions or a massive budget increase.
And the Chinese are quickly closing the naval gap. From 2015 to 2017, China launched nearly 400,000 tons of naval ships, about double the output of U.S. shipyards over that period.
There are signs the Navy is waking up. Unmanned air, surface, and subsurface vessels are getting serious attention. Unmanned aerial tankers are in production, and the Navy has committed budget space—the only commitment that matters—toward buying ten legitimate unmanned warships—2,000 ton corvette-sized ships that will form an experimental “Ghost Fleet.” Though Americans are largely blind to the many self-inflicted wounds their Navy has suffered, the Navy can no longer ignore the results of these disastrous decades.
In a famous U.S. wargame nearly 20 years ago, the opposition force fired missiles from commercial vessels to help sink the notional U.S. fleet. Today that idea may finally be getting a hearing from the U.S. Navy. Innovative defense thinkers, including the National Defense University’s Dr. T. X. Hammes, have proposed a cheap fleet of missile-laden merchant ships. Manned by small detachments of sailors and able to bring impressive fire power to bear, “missile merchants” would provide a less expensive way to deliver modern naval ordnance (cruise missiles) that could be dispersed and fairly survivable without wrapping a $2 billion-dollar destroyer around 96 missile tubes. Unfortunately, this idea is swimming upstream against Navy culture and rice bowls.
In addition to finding ways to design, build, and arm warships faster and cheaper, the current strategic landscape demands that the nation accept geography and the inescapable evidence that the post-9/11 wars failed. It is high time to shrink the Army to maintain the Navy.
The United States does not need a large standing army—and has not for decades. A large army may even be an invitation to further ill-conceived military interventions abroad, interventions in which few American citizens have any skin in the game. The Washington Post’s release of the “Afghan Papers” this week only confirmed what a fool’s errand our longest war has been. But cutting the Army significantly—and doing so on the grounds of national security—would take courage and vision that seem to be absent among the nation’s governing class.
The Founding Fathers had a well-documented fear of large standing armies, a fear with old English roots. The size of the current U.S. Army, unable to defeat ill-equipped irregulars yet an enticement to crusades abroad, would appall them. The Founders did not have the same reticence about navies. The Constitution pointedly gives Congress the power to “raise” armies but to “maintain” a navy. Yet the U.S. Navy—the cornerstone of American national security—is sliding into a parlous condition.
No American citizen should relish the idea of shoveling more money into the ravening maw of the Pentagon. The historically-minded may recall that a naval arms race, based around the big-gun dreadnought battleships, helped drive Britain and Germany to war in 1914. Americans who appreciate the wisdom of Washington’s farewell address and John Quincy Adams’ injunction that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” may question the need for U.S. naval primacy, especially as they stare at mounting fiscal liabilities at home. But naval preeminence is the one defense argument where the hawks have a point. The “stopping power of water” and the “tyranny of distance” still retain their validity in the 21st century.
The United States is fundamentally a maritime power. Though historians and theorists can debate whether the United States is a true “seapower state,” U.S. continental supremacy has been secure for well over a century. The United States, as the old saying goes, is surrounded by friends and fish.
The world is not flat, no matter what the bestseller lists say. U.S. trade and power projection rest on a foundation of naval strength. But the nation’s unequalled strategic geography only remains a critical advantage if the U.S. maintains naval preeminence. The silent scandal of U.S. naval shipbuilding has put the nation’s security at greater risk than any terrorist ever could.