Among the more distressing things I’ve read so far this year is this Washington Post editorial about the abysmal state of the United States Navy. Nothing WaPo says is surprising or new, at least not to people who’ve been following the excellent work of Emma Salisbury or Commander Salamander here on Substack, or perhaps followed the AUKUS saga, in which it has become clear that U.S. shipyards lack the capacity to provide Australia with the subs it wants to buy from us, and that we badly wish to sell to them. In brief, the US Navy has lost the plot. It is not positioning itself to maintain America’s command of the world’s oceans in the 21st century or sustain a major fight. It is not that the Navy lacks top-shelf ships and technology, it is that it struggles to build and sustain them. It has neglected the Merchant Marine. It has neglected logistical capabilities. It has neglected its industrial base. It can barely find and retain crews for its ships. All this despite new threats to global shipping such as the Houthis, and volumes and volumes of official U.S. rhetoric for more than a decade about countering China and China as a “pacing threat.”
What concerns me is how little attention is paid to the state of the Navy. It is a scandal that should dominate the headlines. It is a stick that Republicans would be entirely justified to use to attack the Biden Administration (not that Obama and Trump do not share responsibility for the Navy’s many problems). What must be emphasized and shouted as loudly as possible is that the U.S. Navy perhaps more than any other service is critical to American security and the preservation of its global status. It is the Navy that allows us to project force beyond our coasts; it is the Navy that keeps others from doing so if their actions do not align with U.S. interests. It is the Navy that ultimately sustains the global economy upon which we all depend. And all of this is made possible because we have been the pre-eminent naval power since Great Britain handed the baton to us in World War Two. Losing that status would be disastrous for America and the world.
The many actors and factors that have contributed to the current disaster have been identified already by numerous experts such as the two cited above. The Government Accountability Office also has plenty of sobering reports on offer, like this one. I have no need to summarize these here. I would like to point to some worthy of particular attention.
First, it turns out that Obama’s famous quip during the election debate with Mitt Romney about “horses and bayonets” was not entirely accurate. Yes, technology has changed dramatically and our fleet, though much smaller than it has been in the past, in many ways is far more capable. But it also is a question of “counting battleships.” Of numbers. We need more ships and more people to crew them. We need larger inventories of weapons for those ships to use. We need greater shipyard and logistical capacity. If, God forbid, we were to find ourselves in a significant conflict, the loss of any of our warships would place us in a perilous position because we cannot replace those ships in any reasonable timeline.
Once we made things
A second has to do with our military’s fixation on high-end technology, which results in a force that possesses a shrinking number of exquisite weapons systems we not only cannot afford to build at scale, but cannot replace because our industrial base effectively has become artisanal rather than industrial. It’s geared to build a few items per year and cannot do more.
A third is simply a lack of appropriate attention paid to sea power. The simple arguments of Alfred Thayer Mahan that helped propel America’s rise as a world power have been neglected. Mahan was wrong about many things but correct on the essential point: Great Powers need great navies. I have seen no evidence that any new development either in technology or global geo-politics has rendered Mahan’s basic insight invalid.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
How did we forget Mahan? Perhaps our collective fascination with air power has distracted us. Perhaps the fact that the Navy has not played a prominent role in any of our post-World War II conflicts has blinded us to the fact that its role in those conflicts was, in fact, critical: Without dominance of the seas, we would not have been able to fight in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, nor would we have had any hope for supporting a significant land conflict in Europe or anywhere else. If, in the 21st century, our naval dominance would face serious challenges, as China now does, our military power, however large or “lethal” our Army or Air Force, would face profound constraints. And then there is the question of what would happen if global maritime commercial traffic were to be seriously threatened, which is now happening in the Red Sea. It has been a very long time since the American economy was sufficiently autarkic that we could afford to suffer threats to commercial shipping, or simply allow others to take care of the problem. Once upon a time, we could rely on the Royal Navy to do so. Those days are long gone.
Interestingly, the current crisis in the Red Sea has revealed that the world still counts on the United States and its Navy to take care of the problem. If we fail, or if the Navy proves incapable of dealing with the problem while also maintaining the kind of posture it is supposed to be maintaining in the Indo-Pacific, the world will look elsewhere. That transition will not go well, either for us or for the billions of people presently sustained by the global world order, of which the U.S. Navy is the principal steward.