Can We Get Serious About the Navy Now?

The Real World Gets a Vote

Shortly after the Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel on October 7th, the Secretary of Defense ordered the U.S. Navy’s USS FORD (CVN 78) Carrier Strike Group (CSG)--already in the Mediterranean--to move East to provide support to Israel and to send a strong deterrence message to Iran and Russia not to foment further aggression in the region. Hard upon that order came news that the FORD CSG had been extended on its deployment, and that its relief CSG (USS EISENHOWER (CVN 69))—already scheduled to deploy--would proceed from the U.S. East Coast through the Mediterranean to operate in the Central Command area of responsibility (AOR) (typically the North Arabian Sea and the Arabian Gulf).

To those who follow national security matters closely, these movements are routine and expected. The Navy maintains significant combat power in key locations around the world in order to protect American national security and promote American prosperity where they are most threatened. Presidents of both parties have used these forces to respond to crises and to signal intent since the end of World War II, and the Navy is sized and shaped both for the requirements of formal war plans and the everyday business of deterrence, assurance, crisis response, and naval diplomacy.

USS CARNEY (DDG 64) in action vs. Houthi missiles and UAV. (US Navy Photo)

When the Biden Administration entered office in January of 2021, their focus was primarily (and correctly) on China, which they believed the previous administration had mishandled. Not only had the Trump team antagonized Chairman Xi with talk of the “China Virus”, but their desire for larger defense budgets aimed at increasing hard power—including a larger Navy—represented an outdated approach to a modern opponent, one that the U.S. would need to out-compete on a playing field larger than simple hard-power force ratios. And while the Trump Team had talked a good bit about a larger Navy, precious little was done in the way of planning and resourcing it. In a cynical and theatrical parting shot, the Trump Administration put forward a significant (and important) plan to grow the Navy a month after they were voted out of office, a plan the Biden team ignored.

Budget realities being what they are, restraining Pentagon growth was to be the bill-payer for all manner of Biden domestic priorities, some of which would be swept up under the rubric of an approach known as “Integrated Deterrence.” Integrated deterrence took as its central proposition that hard power’s place in the tools of deterrence was over-emphasized, and that investments made in other elements of national power would be both more effective and efficient in deterring China. Clean energy investments, incentives for “on-shoring” of vital industrial capacity, freeing the workforce from a portion of the debt accrued in becoming better educated, and various physical and virtual infrastructure projects were put forward as part of a larger strategy for “strengthening” America for its competition with China. One can quibble with the wisdom of the Biden Team’s approach (and I do), but it was center-of-mass, modern Democratic Party stuff, it represented a solid stab at actual grand strategy, and it was part of the message that prevailed in that election.

It was clear from the earliest days of the Biden Administration that U.S. Navy force structure was almost certainly going to be a source for the “savings” the administration was seeking to harvest. Behind the smokescreen of “Integrated Deterrence”, the administration got to work on its approach, in which the Navy was given clear strategic guidance to focus on a shooting war in the Pacific, and that those things in its remit that were less important to that focus would need to be de-emphasized or shed. Chief among those items to be de-emphasized was the Navy’s practice of maintaining forward deployed forces. Not only was sizing the Navy to enable forward presence creating a self-fulfilling need for ships to be forward, but there was a perception that maintaining these forces forward in the absence of actual conflict or crisis was devouring resources better spent maintaining readiness of forces retained in surge posture.

To its credit, the Administration leaned forward to fund platforms and capabilities deemed critical to a shooting war in the Pacific. Precision munitions, space-based intelligence, and unmanned platforms of all types rose in importance and were funded accordingly. As these capabilities are not inexpensive, one source of funding was to be the cannibalization of existing ships deemed less important to the fight (but which are essential elements of the Navy’s forward deployed force posture), including amphibious ships, small surface combatants (the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) in particular), and older AEGIS class cruisers. Again, in fairness to the Biden Team, the drop in the number of traditional amphibious ships began during the Trump Administration when the-then new Commandant of the Marine Corps put forward a vision that resulted in a decrease in the desired force of 38 ships to 31. This was a bad idea when it was put forward, and the past three years of the USMC being unable to respond to crises due to insufficient shipping has been a predictable result.

Nearly three years distant from the election that enabled the Biden team to put their ideas into action, the world is a very, very different place. The Navy they inherited was too small for the world that existed then—the one in which the administration monomaniacally focused on China—and they set about making it even smaller by focusing it on warfighting at the expense of conventional deterrence, assurance, crisis response, and naval diplomacy, claiming that these functions were not worthy of additional force structure. Congress did not agree with this path and added considerable resources to Navy priorities in each budget cycle. Additionally, Congress explicitly changed the Navy’s mission to make it clear that peacetime security and prosperity functions were as important to national security as wartime requirements. Thus far, there has been no sign that the Administration has factored Congressional will into its planning and resourcing.

What I find most interesting is how thoroughly discredited the entering strategic arguments of the Administration have become as evidenced by their predictable (and warranted) employment of naval force in response to the war in Israel. Let us take them at their word and imagine a world in which the Navy was smaller, potentially maintained in a higher state of readiness, and only episodically employed outside of home ports, mostly for multi-national exercises or large fleet battle experiments. Under this approach, there is almost certainly not an on-call Carrier Strike Group in the Mediterranean when Hamas made its attack. Perhaps there would be one in a four-day ready to deploy status on the East Coast, but even under the best of circumstances, the group would not be positioned in the Eastern Mediterranean for ten days or so. The second Carrier Strike Group (CSG) that they ordered to the region? Well, that’s kind of a stolen base in that the CSG was already scheduled to move in that direction as part of a regular chain of CSG deployments. If the Biden approach to naval force posture were in place, what would be the likelihood of a second CSG being at the level of readiness required to move quickly to a forward-based deterrence posture? Or the likelihood that USS CARNEY (DDG 64) would have been in position to shoot down a number of Houthi Land Attack Cruise Missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles reportedly headed for Israel?

The plain truth is that we are relatively safe on our island continent with friendly neighbors, while our critical economic and security interests are far flung and distant. Add to this the fact that ships move rather slowly, and you come up with the sensible (for a dominant world power with our geography) practice of maintaining significant naval force forward in locations that matter in order to protect those interests. To support this force—in this case, a CSG in the Mediterranean, the Navy must have a CSG that recently returned from being forward resting and in maintenance. It must have another CSG in which the ships are mastering unit level operating skills. And it must have another in which the CSG is formed and practicing fleet operational patterns that it will put to use when it relieves the on station CSG. Four ships to make one, four CSG’s to make one CSG.

The same math applies to the other large unit of issue of naval power, the Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG). The ESG is a group of three ships optimized for power projection, in this case, the power of the U.S. Marine Corps including Marine air power operating from an amphibious assault ship (LHD or LHA). There was not an ESG in the Mediterranean when Hamas attacked, but there was one deployed in the Central Command AOR that is reported to be moving to the Mediterranean. The gap in ESG coverage in the Mediterranean is a consequence of a Navy that is one third too small, as it has been sized and shaped to maintain CSG and ESG coverage in at most two locations simultaneously, a decision that pre-dates the Biden Administration. That said, were the Biden Administration’s preferences for naval force posture fully supported by Congress and implemented, there would be NO guaranteed CSG or ESG coverage anywhere outside of the Western Pacific where those forces are attached to treaty obligations.

The ironic bottom-line is that President Biden had options on October 7th because his administration’s approach to the size, shape, and posture of the Navy has not been supported or achieved. He had options because even a Navy that is a third too small will sometimes be in the right place at the right time when it is needed if postured forward, but a Navy that is postured for surge operations in and around U.S. home ports is almost always not going to be where it is needed.

It is time for the Biden national security team to recognize that they got this one wrong, and that they need to support a larger Navy. That support would come in the form of a broad-based increase to the Navy budget, an increase that would fund maintenance, modernization, training, operations, and manning more fully for a larger fleet. It would include a significant increase in the budget for shipbuilding, to include capital investments in public and private shipyards, and additional ships being ordered from hot production lines to send the message that we are growing the Navy to meet our needs. And because building ships takes time, it should apply resources to slow or stop the decommissioning of ships with useful life left in them, ships that can contribute to the force needed to deter, assure, and respond to crises in three separate locations simultaneously. Now that the real world has definitively revealed the unsuitability of their approach, the Biden Team needs to get serious about the Navy.