Two Cheers for the Secretary of the Navy

In a recent Op-Ed at Defense News “Del Toro’s Case for Funding the Navy and Marine Corps”, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro makes a solid argument for the importance of the Navy and Marine Corps while rightly pointing to Congressional malpractice with respect to the process of resourcing those Services. He is to be commended for this effort, rightly warning of how failing to pass a defense appropriation injects uncertainty into a time of growing insecurity, not to mention the impact of cuts he would be forced to make across the board on priorities of the Services and Congress alike. That said, the Secretary goes too far on one issue, skirts a second, and ignores a third, all of which deserve consideration.

Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro

First, the Secretary rightly points to the ruinous impact of sequestration on readiness in the previous decade. Navy Secretaries and CNO’s alike repeatedly warned Congress of what the impact would be, and then repeatedly reported what the impact was throughout years of insufficient resourcing and readiness decline. By the summer of 2017, when in two separate collisions involving Navy destroyers 17 Sailors died, several years of readiness decline had gotten traction. Yet, to so closely tie those accidents to the impact of sequestration minimizes the plain truth that people who knew better chose not to do what they knew to be right and what they were trained to do in both tragedies. There is no question the fleet was being run on the ragged edge at the time, and the readiness impacts were manifest. However, any competent reading of the reports of the accidents makes it clear that errors in professional judgement and competence were the direct cause of the collisions.

The second area worthy of consideration is the degree to which the administration in which Secretary Del Toro serves has actively pursued the laudable ends the Secretary advocates. While it is true (as the Secretary states) that the 2024 Defense Budget submission called for an increase to the Department of the Navy, the size of that increase (4.5%) is largely eaten up by inflation, and it follows three other budget submissions (a 2021 budget amendment, and the 2022 and 2023 budgets) that did not keep up with inflation and which were insufficient to grow the Navy in order to meet the missions the Secretary cites:

For hundreds of years, the sea has proved a vital artery of American prosperity, fueling our economic engine by allowing us to engage in commerce on a global scale. We rely on our world’s oceans for food, for natural resources, for the transportation of goods and people, and more recently to carry vast amounts of data via undersea cables. To maintain our nation’s unrestricted access to sea, and to guarantee the free flow of maritime commerce for ourselves, our allies and our international partners, our nation requires a capable, agile, and lethal Navy and Marine Corps.

Three straight insufficient budgets were part of the reason that Congress amended the Title 10 mission of the Navy in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to recognize the Department of the Navy’s contributions to peacetime security and prosperity, the very things Secretary Del Toro mentions in his Op-Ed. It is unclear at this point that the Navy’s budget in any way reflects this broadened mission, and there is some question as to whether the kinds of activities that comprise “…maintain(ing) our nation’s unrestricted access to the sea and to guarantee the free flow of maritime commerce…” are considered by the Secretary’s boss (the Secretary of Defense) to be worthy of resourcing at all. Lumped into the National Defense Strategy’s rubric of “campaigning”, these peacetime naval activities—like other force structure associated with campaigning—continue to be treated as lesser included activities of warfighting force structure and are therefore not resourced.

Finally, Secretary Del Toro missed an opportunity to criticize Congress for the failure of the National Commission on the Future of the Navy that was directed by the 2023 NDAA. This Commission—which should have begun its fifteen-month deliberations in March of this year—has not formed due to lacking the required number of commissioners, each of whom are appointed by leaders in Congress. That fifteen months is now down to six and a half months, and given the scope of what the Commission was assigned to consider, adhering to the current schedule would guarantee a substandard product.

Secretary Del Toro has been an excellent Secretary of the Navy, and I shudder to think where the Navy would be at this point in this Presidency had there been a lesser Secretary at the helm. But we can never forget that the only times in our nation’s history when the Navy grows is when there is a President who actively seeks that growth and empowers his subordinates to make it happen.