Complacency and neglect weaken the Navy amid growing threats
19 hrs ago Comments
“This stadium reminds us of the great battles in which those who came before you fought to defend democracy. Belleau Wood. Guadalcanal. Iwo Jima. Inchon. But what you don’t see here is all the battles that never occurred, all the wars that never erupted — because American Sailors and Marines showed up. They deterred conflict. They kept the watch.” — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, U.S. Naval Academy commencement, 2023
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, wants you to be as alarmed as he is about this: If deterrence, which failed regarding Ukraine, fails regarding Taiwan, this might be because adversaries understand that U.S. leaders have allowed the nation’s defense industrial base to become shockingly short of capacities commensurate with the world’s multiplying threats.
The U.S. Navy — the nation’s principal means of power projection; the answer to the “tyranny of distance” in the Indo-Pacific — is Wicker’s foremost concern. Production of stealthy, lethal attack submarines, which Wicker calls “the crown jewels of U.S. military power,” should, he says, be doubled. The Navy has only 49, and Wicker says nearly 40 percent cannot be deployed because of maintenance delays. So, crews endure grueling operation tempos. Retention falls.
Just to fulfill the 2021 AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) commitment without reducing the U.S. supply of attack submarines, U.S. production would have to be 2.3 to 2.5 submarines a year. Since before the AUKUS agreement, Congress has been providing funds for two a year, but only 1.2 are being built.
Today’s total U.S. fleet is not quite 300 ships. The fleet has generally been under that number for 20 years. A 355-ship fleet, the fleet size at the end of the Obama administration, is a statutory aspiration, but would be 100 too few. A just-published study by Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain now with the Sagamore Institute, notes that although a Biden administration document endorses 381 ships, the Navy’s shipbuilding budget is consistently much too low to meet proclaimed goals.
https://www.marshallnewsmessenger.com/complacency-and-neglect-weaken-the-navy-amid-growing-threats/article_27456a8a-7507-11ee-b898-9303817b929e.html
