The Lost Opportunity

The Failure of the National Commission on the Future of the Navy

Today—March 22, 2024—marks the one-year anniversary of the date the legislation creating the National Commission on the Future of the Navy directed that commissioners be appointed and the Commission begin its activities. The Commission has not formed, and it has not met. It is a failure.

From a bygone era…

In early October of last year, five days before Hamas perpetrated its murderous attack on Israel, an attack that reacquainted the Secretary of Defense with the importance of the United States Navy, I posted here an item titled “Another Congressional Embarrassment: The Failing National Commission on the Future of the Navy”. In it, I laid out the mandate for the Commission and what was at that time, the troubling fact that the Commission had not even formed because several members had yet to be appointed:

“Six months and one week of the fifteen months allotted have expired and the Commission has yet to begin its work. This is because only five of eight members have been appointed:

• By the Senate Majority Leader (D): Thomas Ross (February 16th 2023)

• By the HASC Chairman (R): Bryan McGrath (March 20, 2023) (by letter to the Secretary of Defense)

• By the Senate Minority Leader (R): Mackenzie Eaglen (April 25th, 2023)

• By the SASC Ranking Member (R): Mitchell Waldman (April 25th, 2023)

• By the Speaker of the House of Representatives (R): Scott O’Neil (June 8, 2023)

• By the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives (D): NO NOMINATION

• By the HASC Ranking Member (D): NO NOMINATION

• By the SASC Chairman (D): NO NOMINATION

I am aware of no additions to this list since then.

Also in the interim, the Navy has responded to the Middle East contingency by employing two separate Carrier Strike Groups (CSG), it has been engaged in a shooting war with Houthi Rebels, and it has submitted a budget in which it moved an aircraft carrier acquisition two years to the right, dropped an attack submarine due to industrial base performance, purchases distressingly few weapons given the numbers it is currently expending, and acquires six ships (while decommissioning 19) in FY 2025.

The bucket has a hole in the bottom.

The wisdom Congress displayed in legislating this commission into existence in the 2023 NDAA has disappeared into election year politics, and whatever insights the Commission could have offered will now lose the centrality and focus offered by such a forum.

This is a loss—for the country, for the Congress, and for the Navy.

There are really smart people whose job it is to address the future of the Navy, but those people are constrained by the organizations in which they work. Uniformed officers rightly submit to civilian control. Navy Department political appointees are directed by Defense Department political appointees, who are themselves responsible for implementing broad policy determined by the President. Congress has turned to special commissions for advice throughout the history of the Republic as a means to supplement the information it receives from the Executive, and while no Congress is bound by the decisions of a previous Congress, the purposeful foot-dragging designed to bureaucratically kill this Commission is noteworthy for both its brazenness and its poor timing.

That one of the appointed Commissioners writes these words may cause some to wonder about self-interest. Am I frustrated because I won’t be treated to a taxpayer funded fifteen month boondoggle that results in a report that few will read and that will cause no change? I suppose that might be a fair question if I hadn’t spent the last 37 years working in and around the Navy, and the last 16 years working directly on the issues the Commission was crafted to address. But my delight in being named to the Commission was not in what it might lead to personally but in having one last chance to make an impact on a country I love and an institution that has been of singular importance in my life. I fear that ship has sailed.