What I Believe

The National Commission on the Future of the Navy

PCU JACK LUCAS (DDG 125) (HII image)

“Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” -G.K. Chesterton

Earlier this week, I received notification that I was nominated to serve on the National Commission on the Future of the Navy, a body created in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with the mandate to report (by 1 July 2024) on two broad topics. First, the Commission is to consider what the force structure and architecture of the Navy should look like under four distinct funding profiles (FY23 plus inflation; FY23 with 3-5% real growth; such as is necessary to build, man, maintain, and modernize the fleet required by Section 1025 of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2018 (Public Law 115-91) (355 ships); and notionally unconstrained to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy including a particular focus on the areas of responsibility of United States Indo-Pacific Command and United States European Command). Second, the Commission is to report on the state of American Shipbuilding and options for increasing capacity and capability at both private, new construction yards, public shipyards, and private repair yards. This work is critical to the security and prosperity of the United States and its position of leadership in the world, and I am eager to get started.

I have spent the past 36 years working in and around American Seapower. Along the way, I developed a set of first principles—dare I say a Seapower “ideology”, that I have not been shy about sharing. Go ahead and Google. It is likely that this work and this record led to my nomination for the Commission, and as I look forward to working with seven great Americans to make recommendations on the future shape of the Navy, I come to the task with considered opinions on many of the topics within our remit. Along the way, persuasive counterarguments will cause me to revise these beliefs. That said, there is little in the Commission’s mandate that I approach with a completely open mind, and by that, I mean about which I have no existing opinion. The following summarizes ten of the most comprehensive positions.

Belief 1: Geography is destiny. The Navy’s centrality to our national story pre-dates the Revolution.

The Founders and Framers of this country understood the importance of Seapower. The colonies benefited handsomely from access to the world’s oceans, and they chafed under strictures placed by Parliament upon their access to it. General Washington feared the mobility of the British Army (provided by the Royal Navy), and he cheered the power of the French Navy in cutting it off.

These experiences and a keen sense of geo-strategy reflect in our Constitution. Among the specific (enumerated) powers of the Congress described therein is the duty to “…provide and maintain a Navy” (Article I Section 8), which the Framers placed directly after the provision to “raise and support Armies but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”. Note the language here. Armies are to be “raised” and “supported”, with restrictions placed on the funding to do so; a Navy is to be “maintained”, with no such temporal restriction on funding. The Framers recognized that the Navy is necessary in both peace and war.

These clauses are not repeated here as some kind of end-zone dance designed to denigrate the Army (or any other Service). Our modern sense of ourselves, our position in the world, and our security interests demand that we resource a powerful Army (along with the other Services). Inclusion here is simply a means to reinforce the wisdom of the founding generation and their keen understanding of geo-strategy, an understanding that is no less critical today. A continental nation, bordered by friends, bathed by the world’s great oceans, and possessed of global economic and security interests, must always look to the sea, and it must do so with a powerful, global Navy.

Implication: The Commission should consider the wisdom of the Founders and Framers and evaluate whether there have been any important modern developments that should cause us to rethink that wisdom.

Belief 2: The Navy appropriate for a nation of our geography, our position in the world, our global interests, and our international influence, must be postured for strength in peace and war.

What is it then—in a modern context—is the Navy supposed to do? In other words, what is its mission? The Navy’s mission is a matter of public law under Title 10, and it is repeated here:

“The Navy, within the Department of the Navy, includes, in general, naval combat and service forces and such aviation as may be organic therein. The Navy shall be organized, trained, and equipped for the peacetime promotion of the national security interests and prosperity of the United States and prompt and sustained combat incident to operations at sea. It is responsible for the preparation of naval forces necessary for the duties described in the preceding sentence except as otherwise assigned and, in accordance with integrated joint mobilization plans, for the expansion of the peacetime components of the Navy to meet the needs of war.” (Title 10 USC Sec 8062(a))

This version of the Navy mission is relatively new, revised in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) after lawmakers rightfully saw the previous language—which made no explicit reference to peacetime security and prosperity functions—as inadequate when compared to what has been asked of the Navy since the earliest days of the Republic. This insufficiency created misunderstanding and tension in the Pentagon, as the Navy sought the force structure necessary to carry out its Constitutionally-driven combat and peacetime functions, only to be met by objections from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the other Services that only the combat role should be considered, that the things the Navy did in peacetime were essentially lesser included missions.

Implication: The Commission should interpret its tasking from the Congress primarily through the lens of the new, broadened mission of the Navy contained in the same legislation that created the Commission.

Belief 3: The Navy has intellectually shifted from a post-Cold War mindset to one appropriate to renewed great power competition. It is not being resourced accordingly.

The Navy that emerged from the Cold War was—over the next three decades—a Service that prized efficiency over effectiveness, that relentlessly privileged capability over capacity, that valued “just-in-time” manufacturing over redundancy and fully-stocked spare parts depots, and that nurtured an industrial base that was, as the CEO of Lockheed Martin said recently “…scoped for maximum efficiency at peacetime production rates”. These practices were acceptable in the absence of great power competition but no longer suffice today. The Navy needs more surface combatants, amphibious ships, aircraft carriers, and logistics vessels including sealift; submarines, tactical aircraft, unmanned vehicles of all kinds, maritime patrol aircraft, and organic intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft. The Navy needs more people, precision weapons, and spacepower. When in conversations with Navy leaders, their understanding of the challenges they face is clear, and they take the threats to our security and prosperity seriously. They do the best they can to make what they are given go as far as it can to meet the requirements of the Navy Component Commanders (NCC) and future readiness. As the enabling legislation of the Commission suggests, what they have been given is not enough.

Implication: The Commission must seek the counsel of the senior OSD officials, Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO, the Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC), and the Navy Component Commanders. Additionally, they must understand impediments to achieving what is required, irrespective of their nature (fiscal, strategic, technological, bureaucratic), and call them out.

Belief 4: The national maritime industrial base is insufficient to support the Navy we have, let alone the Navy we need.

We can no longer afford an industrial base scoped for peacetime efficiency. Capacity and redundancy are inefficient but crucial in an era of renewed great power competition. The goal of maximizing competition in pursuit of cost savings must give way to increasing supply chain diversity. The maritime workforce—mariners, skilled blue-collar artisans, naval architects, and engineers—should be a target for additional, focused federal and state spending. The Navy must sail in defense of free-market capitalism, but it must not slavishly adhere to a notion thereof. As much as some would like it to be, the Navy is NOT a business. Government intervention in this space is a national security imperative. If we wish to have a ship repair industrial base aligned to a larger fleet, we will have to pay for its development. If we want to have a workforce capable of building more ships, aircraft, submarines, and missiles faster, we will have to pay for its development. If we wish to have an American-flagged merchant marine useful in wartime, we must pay for it in peacetime. Waiting for the market to create these things is a vain hope.

Implication: The Commission must review ongoing efforts to energize the maritime industrial base and make recommendations to improve, supplement, or replace them. The Commission must be unafraid to use the word “subsidy”.

Belief 5: “Forward Presence” is not a mission. It is an employment posture appropriate to the Navy of a nation with our interests and our geography.

Decades ago, the U.S. Navy made a well-intentioned mistake; it adopted “Forward Presence” as a mission, and in some version or another, it has remained so ever since*. The more I have studied this matter, the more I conclude that forward presence is not a mission. The Navy is not present forward to accomplish forward presence. It is present forward because that operational posture is the most effective way of employing naval power in support of national interests. If we could do so effectively from Norfolk or San Diego, I would advocate it. If we could do so effectively with fewer forces forward with more held in reserve readiness, I would advocate it. Until such time as I am persuaded of the efficacy of these alternatives, I will continue to believe that a powerfully arrayed and networked naval force forward is the most effective way to employ naval forces in support of the Navy’s Title 10 mission and the requirements of national strategies.

Implication: The Commission should dismiss arguments that frame forward presence as a mission against which forces are counted. Rather, it should look at what naval forces do forward (sea control, power projection, crisis response, naval diplomacy) and evaluate whether alternative employment postures are as effective for accomplishing these activities.

*This is a mistake of which I was also guilty. In 2007, the Navy issued a maritime strategy known as “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower”, with which I was closely associated. “Forward Presence” was cited a one of six “core capabilities” in that document.

Belief 6: Powerful, forward-deployed naval forces are the lynchpin of this nation’s conventional deterrence posture, and our ability to provide vital crisis response options.

As introduced in the previous Belief, forward-deployed naval forces are essential to conducting the activities required to promote our security and prosperity interests globally. We operate a Navy insufficient to cover two forward operational hubs in a world that demands its presence in three. The Navy should be large enough to operate both a Carrier Strike Group (CSG) and an amphibious Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG) in three areas of the world simultaneously even if it does not employ those forces in all three simultaneously. It must have enough attack submarines to achieve and maintain undersea superiority in the same three areas. It should have enough logistics ships to support these operational hubs in peace and war. By so doing, there would be forces available to address three contingencies simultaneously, or should one area require it, massing forces from one or both of the other two. To provide a sufficient rotation base for training and maintenance, the Navy suggested here is considerably larger than the one we have. For an example of a fleet architecture and force structure capable of achieving this posture, see “Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy”.

Implication: The Commission must review the Navy’s 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan in detail, to include options for maximizing the number of available aircraft carriers over time, increasing the number of amphibious ships, increasing the planned rate of frigate production by bringing on a second shipbuilder, and growing the logistics force faster. Additionally, the Commission should review Navy desires to decommission warships with the preponderance of their service lives remaining and review the available industrial base for options to build unmanned vessels faster.

Belief 7: The Navy cannot “put all its chips on red”. It must be powerful in three geographic regions at once (Europe, The Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific).

I have already discussed the concept of a three-hub Navy. This belief is aimed directly at the suggestion that the Navy (the whole Joint Force, really) should economize everywhere but the Indo-Pacific. Doing so is at best, a scheme for managing decline, and is at worst, a means to indulge anti-Ukraine, pro-Putin impulses. Anyone who thinks a conflict with China would be contained within the First Island Chain is mistaken. Such a conflict would become global almost immediately (an element of this question that contributes to its deterrence). If it DOES occur, having a globally arrayed Navy offers us myriad options that are lost playing “little kid soccer” in the Indo-Pacific, to include the ability to strike at targets elsewhere AND to reinforce Indo-Pacific forces from already deployed assets.

Implication: The Commission should be wary of overcompensation, recognizing that the Indo-Pacific naval force will of necessity be larger than the other two regions in its steady state posture.

Belief 8: The Navy has a readiness problem that must be addressed first.

Today’s Navy is too small for what is asked of it, and what is asked of it is constrained by dubious notions of how best to protect and sustain our security and prosperity. Worse than either of these two sins is that today’s Navy is less ready than it should be. Over time, acceptance of additional readiness risk has been normalized in pursuit of efficiency. There are not enough spare parts to supply an ageing fleet, as stocking spare parts for future use is not efficient. Hands-on, instructor-based training of technicians and mechanics is expensive and inefficient, and has been partially replaced by virtual and computer based training that is efficient but perhaps less effective. Required maintenance periods are deferred to meet operational commitments or in response to insufficient resources. Thousands of at-sea billets including skilled technicians and maintainers are gapped.

The Navy MUST grow in order to carry out its critical missions. But the CURRENT Navy must be resourced sufficiently to achieve higher readiness, and the resources required to maintain higher levels of readiness must be factored into ANY plan to grow the Navy.

Implication: The Commission’s enabling legislation wisely requires it to consider force readiness as part of its force structure/architecture study. The Commission must first see to long-term solutions to these readiness issues before it advocates expending additional resources on growing the fleet. Within the four resourcing options the Commission is required to consider, the resources available for fleet growth necessarily increase as the size of the budget increases. The Commission should be attuned to the “must pay” bill associated with raising current fleet readiness, even as it assesses the “tail” of readiness costs concomitant to a larger fleet.

Belief 9: Everything on the modern battlefield is vulnerable. Vulnerability is therefore a poor single point of analysis for utility.

The aircraft carrier and its airwing is the unit of issue of naval combat power, and the Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and its associated Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) is the unit of issue of America’s on-call crisis response force. All the ships, aircraft, vehicles, and people in these formations are vulnerable to varying degrees in modern war. It has ever been thus.

The utility of these formations in conducting the Navy’s mission should not be compared solely against the most pressing threat to be faced in wartime as the measure of their worth. There is among critics of these platforms, a whiff of ignorance in not only the operating concepts that govern these formations in conflict, but their cost-effectiveness across the spectrum of operations. Because a platform is more vulnerable in a high-end fight with China does NOT mean it is without value or should be decommissioned or truncated. Additionally, acquisition decisions that led to numerous ships in the fleet not possessing offensive weaponry (see LCS, LPD 17) can be reversed, with every ship gaining a measure of lethality. While equipping previously lightly armed ships with offensive land attack and anti-ship weapons does nothing to make these ships intrinsically less vulnerable, making more of OUR ships into threats to an adversary requires him to dilute his available surveillance resources, while having to spread a finite number of weapons across a larger set of threats. Across the fleet, this makes any one ship less vulnerable.

Additionally, if aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships are vulnerable to attack, one must wonder about the case for continuing to buy land-based tactical aircraft, as their launch modality (the airbase) is considerably less mobile (and more vulnerable) than a moving ship.

The bottom line with aircraft carriers is that if we believe that tactical aviation is important to the conduct of war and the termination of war, it is most likely to be delivered from the sea.

Implication: The Commission should closely review the Navy’s Airwing of the Future project to ensure that it is on track to regain airwing range lost in the post-Cold War era. Not only will this create a more capable airwing, but it will reduce the threat to the aircraft carrier. Additionally, the Commission should review the Navy’s efforts to field a High Energy Laser appropriate to providing defense of high value units including aircraft carriers, amphibious ships, and logistics ships, and should make recommendations for acceleration.

Belief 10: Recapitalizing the SSBN force cannot be used as an excuse to under-resource conventional naval power.

Given China’s known nuclear forces and their posture, the case can be made that the path to nuclear war with China is through a conventional war gone badly for them. Therefore, the most effective nuclear deterrent in the case of China is to maintain a robust conventional deterrent. This relationship is different than that of the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War, where the U.S. used its used its nuclear stockpile to offset the perceived Soviet conventional force imbalance.

Replacing the OHIO-Class ballistic missile submarine force is the Navy’s highest acquisition priority and acquiring the 12 desired boats will cost over $100B. If forced to, the Navy will decrease every other program in order to protect this one, something that would invariably reduce the Navy’s ability to perform its global mission.

Put another way (and if you accept my proposition that nuclear war with China comes through conventional war), if recapitalizing the strategic missile submarine force degrades our ability to deter China conventionally, we could spend over $100B on a force designed to deter nuclear war that indirectly raises the (still very low) probability of nuclear war.

The deterrent value of the SSBN vis-à-vis Russia remains to a large extent, unmoored from conventional deterrence provided by naval forces.

Implication: The Commission must evaluate the degree to which the creation of the National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund (NSBDF) has accomplished the goal of fencing off resources to recapitalize the SSBN force, and report its impressions as to whether those costs are in fact being considered part of the shipbuilding budget for planning purposes at within DoD or OMB.

Conclusion

The Beliefs expressed above are not an all-inclusive list, but they do represent a solid group of those I am least likely to be moved from.

Readers are urged to consult the enabling legislation directing the Commission’s efforts between now and July 1, 2024 when its findings are required (2023 NDAA Section 1092). The task laid out is considerable, and the scope of the inquiry is broad. It is particularly unnerving to read the portion of the legislation that directs the four budget levels ranging from status quo to unconstrained, and then consider the possibility of a debt ceiling/federal spending compromise that could cut defense spending in a manner not unlike “sequestration” did for ten years in the previous decade. Sequestration is one of the primary reasons that the fleet is behind the challenge posed by China’s rise, and another round would be ruinous.

I am grateful to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) for nominating me to the Commission, and I hope to be worthy of his confidence. As of this point, only two other Commissioners have been appointed (Mackenzie Eaglen and Mitch Waldman), so the Committee will not begin its work until they are named.

It is going to be a very busy year.