Summary and key points: The U.S. Navy faces significant challenges, including a shrinking fleet size, shipbuilding delays, and maintenance issues that are impacting its readiness and ability to defend America.
-Experts such as Dr. Seth Cropsey, Bryan Clark and others warn of the Navy’s deteriorating state, highlighting the impact of poor leadership, underfunding and mismanagement. With increasing geopolitical threats from China, Russia and other adversaries, the Navy’s ability to meet these challenges is questionable.
– To restore U.S. maritime strength and ensure national security, urgent calls for significant investment and a broad-based naval construction program are needed.
Why the decline of the US Navy poses a serious threat to national security
I’ve been writing about the decline of the U.S. Navy since 2017. We have far fewer ships than we need to defend America. The shipbuilding industry is struggling to produce fewer and fewer ships. Even if Congress appropriated more money, the industry would not be able to deliver more ships any faster. Ships are delivered late and plagued with problems. We have modern weapons that work well, as recent deployments in the Middle East proved, but far too few to withstand sustained conflict. Our enemies overseas are recognizing our weakness and are becoming bolder. As good as our missiles are, the number of ships is limited. Experts warn we will run out of missiles much sooner than we run out of targets. At any given time, a third of our ships are not seaworthy due to maintenance problems.
The Navy’s goal is to have 75 ships ready for short-notice deployment at any time. We barely have 50 ships ready for deployment. The Navy set this goal two years ago and recently admitted it will not be achieved. We have little capacity to mobilize our ships, and the so-called ready reserve fleet is inadequate because it has too few ships. The last mobilization readiness stress test ended in failure.
Navy leadership has been marked by embarrassing failures over the past few decades. Examples include building entire classes of ships like the Zumwalt and LCS that turned out to be complete failures, collisions at sea, and the loss of a submarine for 3 years due to a collision with an underwater mount. The Navy lost one capital ship, the USS Bonhomme Richard, which burned at the pier, a $3 billion loss to the USMC for which there was no replacement. Compounding this failure is the Navy’s failure to provide the USMC with the 38 amphibious ships mandated by Congress.
A rising suicide rate, scandals like Fat Leonard and Red Hill, and an unseemly devotion to politicizing the Navy by celebrating “Pride,” promoting DEI, and diverting resources to combat climate change are all examples of Navy leadership failures. The Navy has a recruiting crisis, is horribly undermanned, and is now forced to send ships to sea with significantly undermanned crews—a recipe for disaster. The Navy recently reported a shortage of 18,000 shipboard sailors and will have missed its recruiting goals by thousands for two years in a row. By more than 3,000 in FY 2022, by more than 10,000 in FY 2023, and is expected to miss by another 6,700 in FY 2024. These shortages are cumulative and unstoppable. These shortages continue despite the Navy lowering standards to try to meet goals.
CBO, GAO, CRS, and Heritage Foundation all warn of the great risk our nation faces with a weak Navy. There are growing doubts about whether we can win the next war. Our enemies China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and radical Islam are taking advantage of perceived weakness by becoming more aggressive. Russia’s war against Ukraine is not in sight. Iran is waging war against the State of Israel, and that is draining our weapons stockpiles that we will need for a looming future conflict with China. China is becoming increasingly aggressive toward Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, and other Pacific states while asserting its hegemony over its far weaker neighbors, while the U.S. largely stands by and tolerates its “wolf warrior” tactics.
Well-known marine experts share my concerns.
Dr. Seth Cropsey began his career as an Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and was later promoted to Naval officer. He served as Deputy Under Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict in the George HW Bush administration. After 15 years as a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, Mr. Cropsey founded the Yorktown Institute in 2022 and is its President. In a recent article he says:
“The U.S. Navy is a ship without a rudder. The longer the service is allowed to deteriorate, the more precarious America’s strategic position will become. Turning it around will not be easy. The best solution would be to retain all the combat ships in the current fleet and encourage allies to contribute with their own industrial bases. This expansion will require significant resources, especially in the area of manpower.”
Bryan Clark is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute. He is an expert in naval operations, electronic warfare, autonomous systems, military competitions and war games. Mr. Clark recently made remarks on the Navy’s management of the USS Constellation-class frigate:
“Instead of starting from scratch, the Navy chose a ship design already used by the navies of France and Italy. The idea was that 15% of the ship would be updated to meet U.S. Navy specifications, while 85% would remain unchanged to reduce costs and speed up construction. Instead, the opposite happened: the Navy redesigned 85% of the ship, leading to cost increases and construction delays. Construction of the first warship in its class, the Constellation, which began in August 2022, is now three years behind schedule, and delivery has been pushed back to 2029. The final design is still not ready.”
Eric Labs is a long-time naval expert at the Congressional Budget Office. He says the shipbuilding industry is in its worst condition in 25 years:
“Navy shipbuilding is currently in ‘terrible shape’ – the worst it’s been in for a quarter century,” he said. “I’m concerned,” he said. “I don’t see a quick, easy way to solve this problem. It’s been a long time coming for us to get into it.”
Bryan McGrath is a retired Navy officer who commanded a destroyer and helped draft the nation’s maritime strategy in 2007. Since retiring in 2008, McGrath has been a key Navy advisor on strategy, operational concepts, and capability development for both the Navy and defense industries. In early 2024, he said:
“The U.S. Navy is too small for what is being asked of it, and what is being asked of it is insufficient to meet the nation’s needs. We have too few ships, submarines, aircraft, aircraft carriers, people, sensors, weapons, and networks. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is growing faster than any navy since the U.S. buildup for World War II, while the U.S. continues to rely on efficient peacetime production levels that ignore the reality of that competition. Relative to the threats it faces, American naval power is weaker than at any time since the start of World War II. While the U.S. Navy remains the world’s most powerful sea-based combat force, not even the Soviet Navy posed as dangerous a threat as the Chinese PLAN does today. The nature of this threat presents the prospect of a PLAN so powerful that it could dominate the Western Pacific and destroy the legitimacy and effectiveness of America’s network of friends and allies by raising questions about America’s willingness and ability to support that network. The ability to dominate a region of the world responsible for 65% of global GDP poses a profound threat to U.S. national security and prosperity, as well as to likeminded nations worldwide. To meet China’s challenge, a broad-based naval construction program is needed, and all elements of the modern, balanced fleet should be expanded.”
Dr James Holmes is the JC Wylie Chair in Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare at Marine Corps University. Professor Holmes recently wrote in the National Interest:
“The U.S. Navy has been ignoring the principle of continuity for decades, and doing so at its peril. Currently, for example, surface combat ships – guided missile destroyers and cruisers – must withdraw from a combat zone when their missile supplies are exhausted. They must steam back to a specially equipped port to re-arm. The logistics fleet cannot re-arm them at sea for fear of damaging munitions or vertical launchers as the receiving and delivery ships sway with the waves. Depending on where the conflict zone is, the simple task of re-arming could mean a journey of thousands of miles – perhaps even to a U.S. seaport. Such a journey would drain the share that ship contributes to the fleet’s overall combat strength – 96 vertical launch silos of missiles in the case of a destroyer, the workhorse of the surface navy – for weeks.”
CDR Salamander is a retired Navy Commander and former destroyer commander. He has been writing an insightful column on all things Navy for many years. I highly recommend his Substack, which you can find at this link. Recently he wrote about the Navy’s amphibious forces. He asks, “What has 29-year-old BOXER been up to?” Well, earlier this month:
